WWW and the Demise of the Clockwork Universe
Point of View
It is essential to realize that any hierarchical organization is decomposed from a Point of View (POV). The top left hand corner of an outline the or the top of a organization chart define the decompositional process for the transactions which occur in the organization. This POV may or may not reflect the best organization for a given function to be performed.
Inverted Perspective
Breaking out of an organization's point of view can be a difficult process. There are too many pressures for maintaining the hierarchy for any but the boldest to venture out. Richard Feynman and Jonas Salk, however, made tremendous scientific inroads by using a technique of inverted perspective, which views the system from the perspective of one of the objects in it, rather that the "top down" decompositional view:
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Feynman's essential insight was to place himself once again in the electron, to see what the electron would do at light speed. He would see the protons flashing toward him--and they were therefore flattened relativistically into pancakes. Relativity also slowed their internal clocks, in effect, and from the electron's point of view, froze the partons into immobility. His scheme reduced the messy interaction of an electron with a fog of different particles to a much simpler interaction of an electron with a single pointlike parton emerging from fog...The experimenters grasped it instantly. (8)
Jonas Salk wrote of a similar thought process:
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When I observed phenomena in the laboratory that I did not understand, I would also ask questions as if interrogating myself: "Why would I do if I were a virus or a cancer cell, or the immune system?" Before long, this internal dialogue became second nature to me; I found that my mind worked this way all the time. (9)
Inverted perspective can be used as a tool for breaking out of the decompositional process embedded in our computer systems as well. For example, the majority of health care computing resources over the past 25 years has been largely devoted to increasing the granularity and efficiency of the billing process. This is a very important process from the point of view of the hospital's "bottom line", and enabled them to charge for things such as boxes of tissues which would not have been possible a generation ago. From the inverted perspective of the object in the system, i.e., the patient, however, this may not be the most critical breakdown of the information. Much like Feynman's view of an electron interacting with a "messy fog" of particles, an inverted perspective of a human being in the health care system would be an individual working with a "messy fog" of information from hospitals, physicians, dentists, chiropractors, fitness centers, personal information, and other sources.
This could have profound impact on the way we see things. For example, the "bottom line" of hospitals in the United States of hospitals is increased by several billions of dollars yearly by providing neonatal intensive care. Five hundred gram premature babies are saved, sometimes at a cost of a million dollars. From the perspective of the bottom line of the hospital, this is a very successful business. However, viewed from the inverted perspective of the mother or child, it would be far preferable to carry the baby to full term and have a normal birth. Many of the mothers delivering premature babies are poor and are not able to afford prenatal health care. Unfortunately, the benefits of providing prenatal health care do not show up on the bottom line of the organizations which benefit from providing neonatal intensive care.
