ROUGHDRAFT IV Networking WHY NETWORKING? The idea of networking does not at first seem puzzling. Systems science people began to use the term in the '50s to denote the path of operations to be completed. Most networking systems- wheter they be the CIA or the antibodies in the digestive tract of the Australian termite, behave similarly, as processors of information along a path. Gregory Bateson (II Cybernetics Frontiers) used to send his students out on this assignment: "Obtain a dead organism and, from what you can see in it, derive arguments to show that it's an information-processing entity. For which you have to deal, obviously, with things like its symmetry, the fact that nothing is rigid in its structure, that every 'straight' line is in fact a self-corrected straight line.. .. Often it comes as news to the students that an octopus is not a sea mammal or that a 'petal' of a sunflower is in fact a whole flower." Then again, Geoffrey Vicker ("Changing Patterns of Communication" in Futures Conditional. [Vol. 3 #2]) has reminded us that the bomb is a form of information. But there are old and mysterious networks carved on rocks by the sea and washed up with morning: syllables pronounced on the graves of the Druids were to have been taken from the "alphabet of the trees. " The ancient, world-wide society of alchemists passed their hermetic secrets from crucible to vial, believing that their information would lead from the transmutation of matter to the transmutation ofthe experimenter himself Not the least, Ariadne's thread, like the networks of the mind, leads out of the labyrinth toward home; Henry the Fiddler, a real person who sings, carries the news from friend to friend on his tours- and the reddleman 's shadow appears on the ridge, whose cart is full ofgossip and wool. - A.H.
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