Semantic web technologies are a bridge or translation channel between the two sides of connectionism. All human thoughts, actions, and memories want to be deciphered, structured by machines, and machine structures understandable by humans.

Brilliant explanation by Kevin Kelly, inspired by Nova Spivack.

It distinguishes human from machine networks and locates the Semantic Web in the space in between.

Here’s the cogent explanation.

Kevin Kelly:

“One strand of massive connectionism is currently called social media. The goal is to connect everybody to everybody else in as many different arrangements as possible. Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Yahoo Answers – the whole 10,000 strong universe of Web 2.0 sites employ various webs of humans to accomplish new things. In this regime, humans are the nodes. They generate the signals.

The other strand of massive connectionism relies on a massive number of machines, CPUs and computer transistors linked together in as many ways as possible to get things done. For example, gigantic server farms, data centers, and telecommunication networks. At the extreme level we’d have to include the mega-network of the One Machine consisting of all cell phones, PDAs, PCs, routers, wi-fi spots, satellite links, and so on. On this side, the signals at each node are generated by machines.

There is a blank white space between these two realms, where both humans and machines could be tightly and massively interlinked – but are not yet.

The entity represented by this space is not just the One Machine composed of all other machines connected together. Nor is it the Noosphere of all human minds connected into one large supermind. Rather it is the vigorous hybrid of both all human minds and all artificial minds linked together. It is the pan-mind. At this juncture the nodes are anything that generates a signal – either humans or machines. “

And what’s the relation of this with the Semantic Web?

Kevin Kelly:

“This cyborgian white space is also where most semantic web efforts are aimed. The idea of the semantic web is to make human connectionism readable by the machine side (and vice versa) so that both webs can work in concert. Semantic web technologies are a bridge or translation channel between the two sides of connectionism. All human thoughts, actions, and memories want to be deciphered, structured by machines, and machine structures understandable by humans.”

For more information: I would like to relate the above story to another aspect of human-machine interfacing. See how Cory Doctorow introduces the “Instrumentation Model of Data“: