The Ecology of Technology

1) How might the metaphor of an ‘ecology’ impact on the way you think about, understand or use the Internet?

In all honesty I feel it doesn't affect the way I think about the internet. But I can see how it can be viewed as such. All the different domains could be viewed as the countries of the world. All the different online communities could be the flora and fauna of this technological environment. How just like an ecosystem where certain species survival depends on other species, certain services on the internet require other hardware and services to be active in order to survive. A simple example would be you need a modem in order to have a basic internet connection, in order to have a working web browser in order to view this blog. In a way I guess the Darwinian theory could be applied to these view of an internet ecology. Survival of the fittest, a simple example could be MSN Messenger, certain versions won't work due to the release of newer versions and in a way the older versions are obsolete or extinct.



2) How are the concepts ‘information’ and ‘communication’ understood within the framework of an ‘information ecology’?

From my understanding using an analogy of a vehicle such as a car and its occupants, information is the occupants and communication is the car which transports them to their destination. Information can be in any form, be it a simple string of text or data packets for a particular file. See a deeper understanding could be that these data packets of information are the atoms of the 'organism'/file in the information ecosystem.



3) Why don’t we talk of a ‘communication ecology’?

We don't talk about a communication ecology as from the material provided to read it is understood that communication is the means by which information travels. So thus being important inside a information or technological ecosystem, it cannot survive on its own. An analogy of what communication can be percieved as is a particular species inside the ecology. Lets say dogs for example, you have poodles, german sheperds, siberian huskies, in communication you have phones, chat software, television. They are 'subspecies' of the superclass species.