1991 – Entangled in a Web
When I was living in North Carolina the local park was a photographer’s delight, with birds, turtles, butterflies, dragonflies and so much more, especially in the early morning. What I found particularly fascinating were the huge spider webs, some several feet across, that would glisten in the early morning hours with thousands of tiny droplets of dew. Impressive to observe, and amazing constructions, even more so given the size of the builders.
After regular attempts to photograph them with the best light and angle, I started to read a little about how they were made. The first discovery was those occasional floating threads, which I had assumed were the results of a web disintegrating, were actually the start of a new one. Apparently, a spider produces a long, fine and sticky thread which is designed to float in the breeze, in the hope that the loose end would hit and stick on a vantage point, there to become the first strand in a new web. When I brushed a thread like that away as I was walking up my drive, I wasn’t disposing of the remnants of a broken web but destroying the possibility of a new construction. That first thread was the way in which a spider could begin to bridge a gap which could be as large as two metres (six feet), using it rather like a lasso.
The first thread would be inadequate to support a web, and so the spider would go up and down, strengthening it with a second, third and more threads, until it had the strength needed to hold up what will become a relatively heavy object. Most webs require two more major external threads, forming a triangle within which the rest of the web is created, but some may have several threads creating an overall web with as many as six sides or more. Once they are established, then the long process of creating the internal threads begins. First, the ‘radials’, which go from one side to another, each new thread close enough for the spider to cross. Finally, starting in the centre, a spiral is spun, initially with non-sticky threads, fairly widely spaced, establishing a structure rather like the scaffolding used by building workers. The last major phase in the work is completing a more closely woven spiral, now using sticky thread. Once this adhesive network is finished, the non-sticky spiral is removed, and the web is ready. In most cases, the spider will remove some threads in the centre of the web.
Spiders wait, usually hiding on the periphery of the web, with one foot resting on a non-sticky ‘signal line’ running from the centre. Once it picks up vibration, it is aware a fly or some other insect has been trapped. Waiting until it is quiescent, the spider goes down to wrap up its meal! Incidentally, the spider travels on the early radials, since these aren’t sticky, but they can stand on the later adhesive threads if they need to so, with fine hairs and a kind of non-stick coating on their feet to ensure they aren’t trapped by their own net.
The image of the web is a powerful one, and it has been used in recent decades in two very telling ways. The first was by a management writer, Sally Helgesen, interested in differences between men and women managers. Her analysis had been stimulated by Carol Gilligan, a developmental psychologist, who had carried out research on the moral development of young women and men, working with Lawrence Kohlberg. Concerned at the common and rather negative view of women’s development, Gilligan found they followed a different path.
She suggested there were two quite different moral perspectives. There was what she labelled the masculine voice, one which is “logical and individualistic”, essentially impersonal, resting on protecting rights and focussing on justice. In contrast, she saw the feminine perspective as one placing more emphasis on protecting interpersonal relationships and taking care of others. Gilligan followed Kohlberg’s stages of preconventional, conventional, and postconventional morality, but for many women these were formulated as:
- Preconventional morality – This stage revolves around self-interest and survival.
- Conventional morality – This stage revolves around being selfless and prioritizing care for others.
- Postconventional morality – This stage involves women paying attention to how their actions affect others, and taking responsibility for those consequences, good and bad. Women also take control of their own lives and show strong care for others.
In 1982, Gilligan’s book, In a Different Voice, set out her work and theories on the moral development stages of women. Her three case studies, on college students, abortion and general rights and responsibilities, led her to examine the ethics of care. Her approach was neatly summarised in a case study on whether a man should steal medicine to save his sick wife. Examining children’s responses, she discovered many boys saw this as a problem of logic whereas the girls were more likely to see this as a problem of conflicting human expectations. While trying to avoid rigid gender stereotyping, Gilligan argued women’s moral viewpoints often centred around their understanding of responsibilities and relationships whilst men’s moral viewpoints instead focussed on moral fairness, which was tied to rights and rules; moral issues as a problem of conflicting responsibilities rather than competing rights. Or what she described as the ‘ethics of care’ as opposed to the ‘ethics of justice’.
Drawing from her work, Sally Helgesen published The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership in 1990, an exploration women’s distinctive approach as leaders, rather than the more traditional approach shown by most men in management. However, it was in her 1995 book, The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations, that the image of the web was to play a key role. As Helgesen saw it, men tend to see the organisation in terms of a hierarchy, structured around rules, whereas many women saw themselves embedded in a network of relationships. Using the image of the web, she argued that women’s’ influence was a function of connections, nor hierarchy, and they could be anywhere in the web and still exercise influence. The image was a powerful one. Much later, when I was writing about inclusive leadership, I noticed that many of the most effective leaders in an organisation were women and men with extensive networks and connections, and these were more important than positional power. You just needed to be in touch, close enough to many people, your finger on a thread, ready to pick up on emerging issues!
Hegelsen’s use of the image of the web was a contribution to a debate about management that continues to this day. At face value, it would seem it is far better to think of organisational relationships in terms of connections rather than hierarchy. While practice and reporting relationships in most enterprises are built around control, the past few decades have seen continuing concern over the undue exercise of ‘power’ and a desire to find less instrumental ways to manage. Many people would argue current management practice shows nothing much has changed. However, as in most such debates, real practice is far from clear cut and exercising control is tangled up with issues to do with authority and responsibility.
The problem is obvious. A formal organisation is a legal entity, a ‘legal person’ in the eyes of the law. For that reason, such entities have a body of rules that people working in the organisation are required to follow. In many senses, organisations are ‘worlds unto themselves’. People occupy positions; in those positions they have both responsibilities, tasks they are expected to perform, and authorities, defining the rights to use resources, financial, physical, informational and human, in order to execute those responsibilities. That system is almost necessarily hierarchical: one manager cedes specific authority to people to carry out the responsibilities they have been assigned, and, as a corollary of such delegations, also reviews and controls how those delegations are used. The alternative to such a formal system would be individual action without a system to limit or shape what a person does, other than ‘good faith’. Experiments to develop an alternative have proved unsuccessful.
Is there room within this framework for a ‘web of connections’? Does this mean the idea of a web is irrelevant or even misleading? Certainly not. Rather this is another framework sitting within the formal system of the organisation, rather like the spider’s web requires a formal and relatively rigid structure within which it can be located. The informal web inside an organisation is one of the ways in which the business can be a more human enterprise, allowing people to be both individual and personal within the overall formal structure. Does that mean it is merely window dressing, a palliative approach, a pretence that covers the impersonal reality? There sits the real debate. Are the people of the organisation forever doomed to be human resources, or something more? Whatever your view, one thing is clear: most people enjoy life in organisations insofar as they can be real individuals, even if that reality can be pushed into the background most of the time as the ‘real work’ is being done.
A rather different way in which the image of the web has been used comes from the internet. What was to become the World Wide Web, WWW, had its origins in the first stages of the internet and the need for various communication protocols. The need for such protocols was evident very early on. When computers were first linked together, researchers sought to share information. Computer programmers realised they needed a high-level language (a level of communication to become known as hypertext) and system to be able make requests between computers and transfer data to anywhere in the world. As you sometimes see in the request box when wanting to visit a specific site, HTTP announces the use of this system (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), one we have been using since 1990. Perhaps the only other critical requirement to allow interaction between devices was the development of URLs, Uniform Resource Locators, the unique addresses for web pages, addresses managed by the overall Domain Name System.
In 1985, Tim Berners-Lee began to work on the idea of a global hyperlinked information system. He had been frustrated with the inefficiencies and challenges faced in seeking information stored on different computers. He put forward his proposal for an approach, which used the term ‘web’, based on an elaborate information management system using links embedded as text: “Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document, you could skip to them with a click of the mouse.” With a colleague, even as with hypertext protocols being still being trialled, he planned a hypertext project he called “WorldWideWeb” (abbreviated as ‘W3’), a ‘web’ of ‘hypertext documents’ to be viewed by browsers. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working system, and first web page came available in early 1991.
The World Wide Web began to enter broader use in 1993–4, when websites for general use started to appear online. However, the turning point was probably in 1993 with the appearance of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser and user interface, which quickly ensured the Web would become by far the most popular protocol on the Internet. As a final comment on the extraordinary technical developments of the time, it is worth noting the World Wide Web and the internet are not the same thing. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks, whereas the World Wide Web is a collection of a variety of types of documents linked by hyperlinks and identified by URLs. I’ll shorten its name to the Web from now on.
So much for technology. We are a long way past those early, exciting days. Although the figures are uncertain, it is estimated there are around 4.7bn users of the Web. The number keeps fluctuating from one day to the next as new items appear and old ones are deleted, but there are at least 35bn webpages available for access. The term webpage is tricky: a webpage is a hypertext document accessible on a website which can be read by a browser (the most common browsers today are Chrome, Edge, Safari, Explorer and Firefox). As for websites, there are some 1.9bn, but, as with webpages, the number fluctuates daily. The term webpage refers to a document, which may contain text, images and figures – the name is meant to reflect the image of the pages in a book.
Like many people, I have several websites I visit frequently, some daily, mainly news sites together with blogs and online magazines, sources of articles and analyses. Most pages I visit have hyperlinks to take me to other material. From the individual user’s perspective, life is simple and easy, going to familiar places and then jumping along promising new links. Seen from about, it must look extraordinarily complex, but it’s made manageable by those unique URLs, hypertext documents and hypertext links. By and large for 30 years, this amazing system has run on the same basis as it was originally developed. Like many others, I keep one foot on one strand of this Web, in this case monitoring a regular set of sites while waiting to see if they offer links to items that might interest me. With limited feet(!!) I keep an eye on Arts and Letters Daily, Aeon, and a few other similar sites. A few is more than enough!
Some peple make frequent use of other monster sites, like YouTube. To understand something of the vast nature of the Web, YouTube, which uploaded its first video in April 2005, now has around 2.3bn users log in every month, and every day around 1bn active users watch one billion hours of videos: it became the fastest growing social media application ever, with around 720,000 hours of videos uploaded every day! Adding to the growing reach of the Web, most people now access applications like YouTube through their mobile devices.
Against these figures, Helgesen’s web of inclusion and Berners Lee’s original World Wide Web now seem excessively simplistic. Going back to reread Gilligan is to rediscover how clearly she revealed the confusions and complexities of caring for others while trying to pursue your own life: her account is scarily revealing of the emotional traumas and dissatisfied feeling and inadequately realised plans of her subjects. While In a Different Voice was seen as one of the key texts for the women’s movement in the latter part of the 20th Century, it is also a thoughtful description of challenges of navigating relationships.
As for the World Wide Web, it has become so complicated that it is no longer possible to understand it or chart it in conventional ways. If only they had known about spiders, the early developers might have been more aware of how important stickiness would become, to trap prey and to tangle up the careless user. Today, traps and interwoven links abound. Most of us rely on searching, blissfully ignorant of the ways in which Google and other search tools shape outcomes for us, based on what is known about our preferences and a host of other factors. Let’s face it, real life in a web-world is both structured and sticky, and we’re so entangled I doubt we can escape. In the World Wide Web, who are the spiders, I wonder?
