1
Use of the Ecosystem Concept on the Web

The animal and the environment are two sides of the same process, the object and the subject of knowledge mutually defining one another.

Humberto Maturana

Without a doubt, ecology drives you mad; that is where one should start.

Bruno Latour

The concept of the ecosystem only appeared comparatively recently and has since been credited to the British ecologist Tansley, who first used the word in 1935. According to Dury, Tansley defines this concept as "a whole constructed by the relations that maintains the living species and the physical habitat that allows them to develop". Moreover, he highlights the shifting nature of this arrangement: "It depends on exogenous or external factors such as temperature, sunlight, humidity, etc., and internal factors such as the population sizes of the living beings that occupy it. The ecosystem is constantly changing according to these factors" [DUR 99, p. 488].

However, long before this word appeared in the field of ecology, we find intellectual practices that hypothesize a system of relations between living populations. Above all, some of these make the link between the organization of living beings and that of knowledge. We think, for example, of the notion of a garden which throughout antiquity up until today has been used as an analogy to reflect upon the human condition in relation to knowledge [HAR 07], or alternatively, to the I Ching, a complex theory that transposed the vicissitude of natural elements so as to model archetypes based on human behavior and the contrivance of these transformations, just as the alchemists of the European Middle Ages did [JUN 88], preoccupations that continue to be prominent in the writings of Haeckel, one of the inventors of ecology that bases this new science on three closely related aspects:

1. 1) "the study of nature as knowledge of the truth (Das Währe),
2. 2) ethics as the search for good (Das Gute),
3. 3) esthetics as the search for beauty (Das Schöne)" [DEB 16, section 24]

This very rapid historical development lays the groundwork for more in-depth research that should be conducted in order to understand the evolution of a thought that associates living-beings and knowledge in the same vision. This work goes beyond the scope of this book which will focus more on the recent usage of the concept of ecosystems in terms of the World Wide Web.

To understand the usage of the ecosystem concept, we began monitoring the Web in 2006 up until now and collected 521 documents which we categorized according to 501 keywords. In the following sections, we will analyze this observation through the themes that seem most relevant to us1.

1.1. For marketing

The first theme we will explore is the most common found online: it concerns the usage of the ecosystem concept in the field of marketing and business. In this context, the linking of a multitude of products or services around a market is represented in graphs that illustrate the concept of the business ecosystem [ASS 16]:

Figure 1.1. The advertising ecosystem in Europe

Keeping in the same field, this next example shows how the term ecosystem is used to illustrate the relationships between different actors and how these actors define strategies for the implementation of a marketing campaign:

Figure 1.2. Ecosystem of a Web strategy2

The final example that we present below highlights one of the limitations of using the ecosystem concept, in that the notion is used here to define a marketing process as well; however, this time, the graphic does not illustrate the complexity of an ecosystem but rather the linearity of a commercial discourse:

Figure 1.3. A commercial vision of the digital ecosystem3. For a color version of the figure, see www.iste.co.uk/szoniecky/ecosystems.zip

In Figure 1.3, the ecosystem concept is used only to insist on a multiplication of the elements; however, all the complexity of the processes is blurred in favor of a single type of relation: the production of money.

1.2. For personal data

Another use of the ecosystem concept is the management of personal data and its construction within a space made up of technologies, networks, data and humans. The example below summarizes how an individual is at the origin of a universe of interactions through a "personal cloud". As we can see, the ecosystem of personal data embraces a wide range of interconnected services where governance forms the basis and the main problem.In this illustration, we note that there is no connection that returns to the individual; this feedback loop is nevertheless a fundamental notion of an ecosystem (see section 3.1.3) and even more central to the notion of personal data management. Indeed, how do we give individuals the means to take control of their data without the possibility of reflective manipulation?

Figure 1.4. Personal data ecosystem4

The management of personal data and its impact on the construction of a digital identity is becoming all the more important in the current era of the Internet of Things and the quantified self. This is evidenced by the CNIL publication on "the new body as a connected object", and more particularly the section dedicated to the "ecosystem and performance"5.

1.3. For services and applications

Beyond the business and marketing aspects, the "Web Giants" (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, also known as GAFAM) develop ecosystems through the multiplication of services and applications.

In order to capture the attention of users, GAFAM deploys a multitude of services and applications whose operation is conditioned with respect to the technical and legal rules of each company. To use these resources, you must necessarily enter the ecosystem of these companies as shown by the popup windows that offer to connect you through your account to a particular company, which thus becomes your identity provider (see section 5.1.2.8).

Figure 1.5. Ecosystem of Google services and applications

In the case of Google, there are a hundred services that are available to users and especially developers who, by using them, will hybridize the Google ecosystem in other areas. Therefore, Google will multiply its ecosystem by giving developers the means to build their own niche markets (see section 5.1.2.3). This raises the question as to the accessibility of these ecosystems and their eventual transformation into "walled gardens":

"From an immense open ecosystem, the Web of today is a succession of what Tim Berners-Lee calls 'walled gardens', founded on proprietary data and the alienation of their users by prohibiting any form of sharing with the outside. The challenge is no longer simply that of open data, but that of metacontrol, that is, the increased control over the migration of our essential data hosted on the servers of these companies, as a result of the trivialization of cloud computing: most of the documentary material that defines our relationship with information and knowledge is about to end up in the hands of a few commercial society" [ERT 11, p. 11].

1.4. For dynamic interactivity

Even if today the dynamic interactivity of a web page seems to be commonplace, it is one of the more important aspects that transforms the Web from a simple document into a living knowledge ecosystem. Since the advent of Web 2.0 and the publication of content that is accessible to all through the simple tools that are social networks, that is, content management tools (see section 5.1.2.9) or services and applications, the Web is teeming with knowledge that is constantly appearing, updating or disappearing. What are totally new in the life cycle of the Web document are real-time updates and the possibility of tracing successive updates. As a result of these two characteristics, we can follow the "pulsations" of the Web as if one is observing a living ecosystem.

For example, the "Listen Wikipedia" web application shows changes to Wikipedia in the form of bubbles that appear and produce a particular sound that is calculated automatically:

Figure 1.6. Listen Wikipedia

1.5. For pictorial analogies

In parallel with the conceptual usage of the ecosystem as a notion, discussed above, our observation revealed instances where this notion of using the analogy with ecosystems was used as a model to organize the graphic and thematic presentation of a site or an application.

The simplest usage is the creation of a domain name related to ecosystems, for example, through the notion of a garden, and to simply use this theme to design an editorial line. This is the case, for example, of a site like https://www.opengarden.com/, which sells an application, allowing the sharing of information between several devices. If we cannot argue that the linkage is actually connected to the ecosystem notion, the analogy is not...