Why the Web Is Like a Rain Forest

The Web is moving from a system where you had to find information on your own – by stumbling across it or someone sending you a link. Today, according to Steve Johnson, the Web is an “information ecosystem.” In Johnson’s essay, “Why the Web Is Like a Rain Forest,” he compares the rain forest to the Internet. As the sun supplies the energy to a rain forest, information supplies the energy to the Web’s ecosystem. Web 1.0 used and disseminated information to a limited amount of people – whoever could a hold of the information, and it was like supplying energy to a desert. Today, with Web 2.0, information is no longer wasted. A person’s thoughts or ideas, discoveries, or news stories are no longer just passed along by default. Web 2.0 has individuals or software programs that absorb all the information on the Web. They take in information, analyze it, package or repackage it, and pass it along different venues where millions have immediate access to it, and the ability to transmit it to others. Information, therefore, is also the nutrients of the forest. The nutrients can be consumed by all, helping everyone to grow and add value to the existing system. The growth is the further expansion of information, by those who use the information and the existing tools to develop more innovations.

I definitely think that Johnson’s analogy is apt. The Web really is a jungle of information that keeps expanding with the help of new technology. Thanks to e-mail notifications that one receives from blog sites, bulletin board discussions, or websites that hold information for specific groups of people, or any site that has anything relevant to someone, everyone can stay updated on just about everything. Software programs have made it so much easier for everyone to stay connected – in a far greater sense that the originators of the Internet must have imagined. There is so much information out there and so many ways to get this information, that it’s hard to think what greater innovations there can be to outdo the existing ones. Or with the heavy amounts of information being sent to us, how can we retain everything? A jungle gets clouded with so many trees and things living in it. When things get convoluted, it’s difficult to see things clearly and in isolation. That’s how the Web is. If you Google a certain topic in, you get millions of hits. Some sites say something, while others say something else. With so much information coming at you, it can get difficult to sort out what you should or shouldn’t take in and use…