Variety and the WWW
Reflections on Stafford Beer's Designing Freedom

A Better Outlook for Cybernetic Man

• Tell me a whole lot more about news item six.
• Show me the family tree of King Priam.
• Get back the work I was doing on my new house.
• Entropy? I don't understand. Stop all this and explain.
• Record in my tax file that today I bought a dog.
• Tell Jack in Vancouver I'm ready for the chess match.
• Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the composer conducting. oh l see.
• AND DON'T TELL ANYONE ELSE UNLESS I SAY SO.

Is this a new prediction for Web interactivity. No, it appeared in Stafford Beer's 1974 book of his 1973 CBC radio lectures, long before Tim Berners Lee invented the WWW.

So let's look at how his cybernetic ideas could inform the development of the WWW.

Variety in systems

Variety

No. of possible states of the system.

Regulation.

Variety absorbs variety, and nothing else can.

Ashby's Law

We need exactly the same amount of variety to absorb variety.

So if we wish to control or regulate a system, the regulating parts need enough variety to deal with the variety in the system they are trying to manage. The system we are interested in is the community of people who interact with WWW sites.

Department store example: now we can surpass the old limits

• All the customers -> a lot of variety
  • (what, when and where they choose to buy)
• Store staff need to absorb this variety when it arises
  • or loose a sale, maybe a customer
• Organisational structure exists to reduce variety
  • (the departments in the store break system into subsystems)

All the customers represent a lot of variety that the store must deal with (control). When a lady chooses a pair of shoes, rather than a fruit cake, there had better be someone on hand rather quickly to take the money, and wrap up the shoes.

Beer said, in 1973:

It sounds ridiculous, but the perfect, undefeatable way to run the store is to attach a salesman to each customer on arrival. ... The example is ridiculous, because we cannot afford to supply requisite variety by this obvious expedient.

But this is no longer ridiculous, when we interact electronically. You can have you personal intelligent agent following you around when you visit a WWW site. On Usenet you still find more answerers than questioners, ready to help out.

But at that time, you had to:

• attenuate the customer's variety, or
• amplify the variety of the store.

Non-interactive WWW sites attenuate the reader's variety.

• You see whatever shovelware they want to show you, then choose to stay or leave.
• There is still a great deal of variety in the whole WWW, but not much in many individual sites.
• Classified indexes and search engines carve up the WWW into subsystems with less variety but possibly fitting the needs of particular groups of people.

We can amplify the variety of the providers to deal with diverse individuals, through:

• Links to other sites,
• Web rings,
• e-mail and form feedback,
• discussion groups and rooms, and
• reviewing and voting systems.

We move from tolerating differences to celebrating individuality. This has parallels in the recent changes in the management of organisations that are driving the knowledge society.