Image via flickr user Martin Sharman

Stories in networked spaces can potentially be disparate connections of ‘bits’. The whole art of working in this space is to think about how these parts can come together to form something different that the sum of its parts. That’s what an ecosystem is: structures and patterns from individual parts – whether that be nature with its flora and fauna, or the online terrain of blogs or hypertext systems.

What’s interesting is that in these ecosystems, scale does not matter. Just because a tree may be the biggest in size, does to mean it’s the most important thing. Each part brings its own importance and diversity to the system. There is no privilege, no hierarchy, and most importantly, no centre. As Jason told us, we grow up thinking there is a centre to everything. This worldview is problematic, and makes it harder to adjust to the mindset that is more appropriate in understanding ecosystems. Everything intercommunicates in complex and interesting ways. However, there is no way of predicting in advance which parts will come to matter, and why this is the case. As Adrian reminds us, it’s only in the doing that these structures and relationships form.

In the symposium, we talked about Cowbird being a good example of the above.  This website, which is a “public library of human experience” takes individual’s stories and collates them into what Adrian calls a ‘soup’ of story, images and videos. These stories then shift from being a distinct island unto themselves, and start having relations with other stories. The story then grows as a consequence to these relations, out of the control of the author.

I asked whether this is similar to Twitter, which brings together information in a somewhat similar way. However, we discussed that Twitter is a timebound stream, which is more ephemeral in nature. You can aggregate and communicate with likeminded people, but it’s not a curatorial space. Hashtags, however, are a little bit more about curation and collation, but it is ultimately different from the above kind of ecosystem.