It's turtles all the way down — and across

I mentioned previously that the creation of the web collapsed the publishing hierarchy into a horizontal model. That's not entirely accurate. If true, that would mean that every website is on an equal footing and that there's no value ranking to websites. That's obviously not true or I'd have Google money.

Hierarchy isn't an accurate term either. Hierarchy ranks various levels in order of importance with the higher levels having more value than each lower level. That's almost true but not entirely. When looking for information on your very best friend, you know, me, is it better to go to Google and look me up, or is it better to go directly to my site? Exactly. In most cases, Google has a higher value than most other websites, but not always.

The correct term for ranking websites is never actually used to my knowledge. It was coined in 1967 by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler used the word "holon" to describe things that are simultaneously whole, while part of something else (from the Greek: holos, "whole"). He rightly pointed out that each level in a hierarchy is both a part of the larger system, and also a complete and whole thing unto itself. Applied to the web we see that every website is a part of the larger web, but also a complete system of it's own. If anyone's made that connection before, it hasn't seem to have caught on. Nevertheless, it's both correct and obvious when you think about it. Websites are holons.

Holons are organized in a holarchy. I'd say that they were ranked, but it's more an organization. Where hierarchies are strictly a ranking model, the value level isn't always as clear in holarchies. Because each individual holon is a whole system, within a whole system, and containing whole systems within it, it's not completely a top-down architecture. Depending on what you're looking for on the web, one holon might be the top level eventhough it's actually the junior of a larger holon. The holon of my site, for example, is the top level Jeremy site, though it's way down at the bottom rung of the web as a whole.

Thus the publishing hierarchy was collapsed, but not exactly into a horizontal model. Instead, it was collapsed into many, many, maybe infinite, smaller systems of ranking within a huge horizontal pool.

An old Hindu story (that has many variations):

A teacher tells his student that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When the student asks what supports the tiger, the teacher says it stands upon an elephant. When asked what supports the elephant, the teacher says it's a giant turtle. When asked what supports the giant turtle, he says: "Stop right there. It's turtles all the way down."