There has been a lot of debate about the right analogy to use for the internet; the road makes sense in some contexts but not in all of them.

However, what you describe is not the Internet. It is the Internet today. And the Internet today is Internet as a platform.

All successful networks have the 3 characteristics you describe:
* Standardisation
* Persistence
* Exposure
The road network is probably the more obvious, but the telecom one is too. [in fact the internet is just a sub-network of the telecom network, one fact that most of us forget, the only difference so far is mostly the business model]

I also appreciate the fact that you underline that now that physical barriers are down, the only one that remains is cultural. If you want to dig this further, have a look to phenomenology. Some folks wrote good stuff back in the 50-70 on this. A shortcut is however Auge’s Non-Places: http://www.amazon.com/Non-Places-Introduction-Anthropology-Supermodernity-Second/dp/1844673111/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235913754&sr=1-1 I am sure you’d like it.

The buzz is not about the buzz itself. Sometimes I (we?) tend to forget that there are people out there who wonder what this is all about and what their benefit is?

Obviously the standard social marketing guru lingo hasn’t resonated with them yet. That’s why they are still bystanders.

That’s why it is important to look at the true core benefits of social media conversation.

If it were only for the purpose of replacing a trip to the local bar I would be a bystander as well.

The result was a series of simple apps which turned broadband into an agent for neighborhood cohesion

This has been implemented at http://www.i-neighbors.org/

*email - Correspond with your neighbors via a neighborhood email list.
*directory - Introduce yourself and learn about your neighbors through the neighborhood directory.
*events – Organize and learn about neighborhood events.
*photos – Share photos of you and your neighbors.
*reviews – See what others have to say about local businesses and add your own opinions.
*polls - Poll your neighbors about important issues.
*govlink – Send free faxes to your local government officials.
files Share documents of interest to your neighborhood.

Rhizome: An Emergent Challenge to Hierarchical World Order

His short, free online book … A Theory of Power

And, I call my “theory” on this stuff “wirearchy” .. an evolution of / from hierarchy in a networked age (obligatory small self-promo plug ;-)

Some time back I did a PhD on French literature, in the course of which I spent a little more time studying literary theory than perhaps was healthy. But one thing really stuck, and it keeps coming back as I read the postings on this site as well as many other aspects of contemporary life.

Often our daily lives these days require us to work in odd, eccentric, highly changing, highly supple environments where there are extremes of ambiguity, change, and sometimes flat panic. At worst this can be very unsettling; at best very exciting.

The ‘Traditional’ workplace, and our social networks in general, had structure, organisation, planning and a measure of knowing where you would be in a year’s time, say. There is nothing wrong with this per se; but it’s just not how we tend to operate nowadays.

So if the old ways could be likened to a tree, growing steadily and predictably in a regular ecosystem, what we do now can be likened to the Rhizome, which is unstructured, making connections in many directions all at the same time in a precarious ecosystem that requires us to have offshoots in several directions all at once.

We could be so unsettled by this that we clam up. What I’m getting at though is that we embrace this concept and way of life and make it our own, grab hold of it and enjoy.

The Root/Rhizome thing comes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (let’s not get too into the debate about their work – it’s a big debate). But it’s an interesting way of conceptualising things – in a way Google is like the tree within the rhizome – the one can’t do without the other…

Some quotations that illustrate the point:
“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things.” This in-between is “by no means an average,” a mediocre point between two old extremes, nor does it go “from one thing to the other and back again.” This between is “a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away…” Whereas trees are rooted to a single spot, coordinated by a central trunk and organized on fixed and vertical lines, this is not the only way plants grow. Grasses, orchids, lilies, and bamboos have no roots, but rhizomes, creeping underground stems which spread sideways on dispersed, horizontal networks of swollen or slender filaments and produce aerial shoots along their length and surface as distributions of plants. They defy categorization as individuated entities. These plants are populations, multiplicities, rather than unified upright things”

It gets more conceptual yet:
“Unlike the tree, the rhizome is not the object of reproduction, neither external reproduction as image-tree nor internal reproduction as tree-structure. The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. It is tracings that must be put on the map, not the opposite. In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths, the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system with a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined solely by a circulation of states”

A bit space-age for some, I guess, but it’s quite a liberating view of how we live.

The ongoing and potentially 24/7 connection to others, almost instantly (and always) to hand, (did I say always ;-), is something that I think is different than anything else before.