Rafał Maciąg

Economic Aspects of the Internet : the Rise of the Commercial Foundations of the Web

The article describes the Internet and the crucial conflict in expectations as regards common convictions which emphasize the social view of the Web. Such views are very popular and as a result they bring the great vision of the Internet as a new public space which demands democratic civil rights for example. In this situation inevitably a conflict emerges between this vision and the business which treats the Internet as its natural environment. The article describes the very beginnings of the Internet and the early phase of this conflict, which has existed from the very beginning mostly due to the counterculture of the sixties in USA. The article also describes the commercial sources of the Web which allowed its voluminous progress and the role of the third player in this game – the Government of the USA which has seen the Internet as a chance for potential economic growth. The article also emphasizes the great significance of the macroeconomic environment in the eighties, which also considerably enhanced the development of the Web. The article documents the predominance of the economic aspect of the Internet, which has become a fact already at the beginning of the nineties and describes incidents which confirm this situation, for example the rebellion of Jon Postel in 1998.

Culture as an internet phenomenon from the humanistic management perspective

The article describes possible uses of the term “culture” as implemented to the Internet and proposes four levels of its interpretation. The fi rst level is proposed for the Web construed as a way of gathering information about cultural events, so functioning mostly as a channel of information. The second level perceives the Internet as an environment for any organization which could be recognized as “cultural” in any way, including public institutions of culture. The third meaning of culture in the context of the Internet gathers all artistic activities usually connected with social actions. These activities could evolve into particular social events, which usually would cover existing social needs or cultural insuffi ciencies. The fourth meaning sees culture as a tool to perform an abstract and general theory of the Internet seen as a broad environment which includes social matters, technology, history, economy and so on. Each level of interpretation is widely described and supplemented by mostly Polish examples and literature.

The article discusses the history of the development of the idea of a network as a tool for research, indicating its dispersion within science, involving the use of extremely different theoretical approaches. The text proposes to include them in the form of the parent confrontation between mainly quantitative research stream and humanistic stream, based on the idea of a network society. It indicates also that a similar breakdown occurs from the beginning of the research within the quantitative stream, taking the form of a confrontation of sociological research and physical or biological research. The article cites facts about the development of all the described tracts, leading to conclusion, that such a state of network research must recall the epistemological reflection on the one hand, and, on the other hand, it establishes the possibility of the emergence of the synthetic and interdisciplinary concepts, which potential examples it shows.

Streszczenie

Artykuł omawia historię rozwoju idei sieciowości jako narzędzia badań naukowych, wskazując jego rozproszenie w obrębie nauki, polegające na stosowaniu skrajnie różnych podejść teoretycznych. Tekst proponuje ujęcie ich w formie nadrzędnej konfrontacji nurtu posługującego się głównie badaniami ilościowymi oraz nurtu humanistycznego, opierającego się na idei społeczeństwa sieci. Wskazuje także, iż podobne rozbicie pojawia się od początku badań sieciowych w łonie nurtu nazwanego ilościowym, przyjmując formę konfrontacji badań socjologicznych i przyrodoznawczych, głównie fizykalnych. Artykuł przytacza fakty dotyczące rozwoju wszystkich opisanych dróg, prowadząc do konstatacji, iż taki stan badań sieci musi w końcu wywołać z jednej strony refleksję epistemologiczną, a z drugiej ustanawia on możliwość pojawienia się koncepcji syntetycznych i interdyscyplinarnych, których potencjalne przykłady wymienia.

Teatr, a w szczególności realizację spektaklu teatralnego, można niewątpliwie zdefiniować jako „grupę ludzi współpracujących ze sobą w sposób uporządkowany i skoordynowany dla osiągnięcia pewnego zestawu celów”. Ta najogólniejsza definicja organizacji, którą przedstawia Ricky Griffin, pozwala zastosować współczesną teorię zarządzania do opisu pewnych, istotnych, jak się okaże, problemów tego rodzaju aktywności. Giep Hagoort w swojej pracy poświęconej zarządzaniu organizacjami działającymi w sferze kultury przytacza dwie podstawowe definicje. Pierwsza pochodzi od Doede Keuninga i Dereka Jana Eppinka i wprowadza trzy podstawowe elementy: ludzi, łączącej ich współpracy, podjętej w realizacji określonego celu. Definicja druga, Alfreda Kiesera i Herberta Kubicka, wskazując na formalną strukturę umożliwiającą realizację celu, uzupełnia definicję pierwszą. Hagoort, łącząc te dwie propozycje, przedstawia syntetyczną, trzecią, ostateczną konstrukcję: „W odniesieniu do sektora kultury zdefiniowałbym wówczas organizację, jako: formalne związki, w ramach których ludzie pracują razem, by osiągnąć kulturalne cele”

The article tries to describe two key points of the Internet’s history in the context of the notion of environment: the emergence of the World Wide Web and the dotcom bubble. The first was the effect of Tim Berners-Lee’s invention but also the source of rapid growth in the commercial sector on the Internet, which can be proved by the number of enterprises registered in the web. The change also expressed itself as a massive, ubiquitous participation of people, which has been constituted by the numerous communities of retail clients. The second key point was the Nasdaq stock market crash, when many companies from the ICT sector lost their assets or even failed. It was also the beginning of a new phase of the Internet and a fundamental change in its functioning. User changed its character to the participant and co-worker – an active element. The effects of this change can be observed as a fundamental change of nature of most web processes. Thanks to this analysis one can see the convergent and complicated nature of the Internet, based mostly on two forces coming first from the technology and then inevitably from the economy.

Advanced NLP Procedures as Premises for the Reconstruction of the Idea of Knowledge

The article presents the current state of development of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, in particular the GPT-3 language model, and presents its consequences for understanding the phenomenon of knowledge. The NLP technology has been experiencing remarkable development recently. The GPT-3 language model presents a level of advancement that allows it to generate texts as answers to general questions, as summaries of the presented text, etc., which reach the level surpassing the analogous level of human texts. These algorithmic operations lead to the determination of the probability distribution of its components. Texts generated by such a model should be considered as autonomous texts, using immanent, implicit knowledge embedded in language. This conclusion raises questions about the status of such knowledge. Help in the analysis is provided also by the theory of discourse, as well as the theory of discursive space based on it, that proposes the interpretation of knowledge as a trajectory of discourses in a dynamical space. Recognizing that knowledge may also be autonomous, and in particular not be at the exclusive disposal of humans, leads to the question of the status of artificial cognitive agents, such as the GPT-3 language model.

Humanistic management – theory based on the pragmatist approach

The article presents a theoretical approach to management seen from the humanistic point of view. This kind of consideration becomes urgent especially in the context of the contemporary economic environment. Its turbulent and rapid changeability and the increasing role of information imposes a reconstruction of the management theory and methodology. The main question of the investigation concerns possible reasons for using the term “humanistic” in the context of management. This term is based on a different kind of knowledge but is very promising as a possible theoretical extra supply. The article proposes to see the process of management as a pragmatic process because it leads to a specifi c result, which is the change of a certain chosen segment of reality. This change is also expedient and pragmatic because it uses conceptual constructions to determine and describe itself. At the same time, the so described theory of management encounters a very important set of theoretical concerns tied with the contemporary discourse on knowledge and its conditions. This kind of discourse played a fundamental role in the second half of last century and changed most of our beliefs about such concepts as knowledge, truth and so on. It also led to the rebirth of crucial epistemological questions. This kind of concerns and questions make theory become humanistic, which also happens with the theory of management which, in this way, acquires the right to be seen as humanistic.