People desire metainformational depth -- information about information about information.  We're constantly trying to understand the swirls of data and stimuli around us.  We find a face beautiful when it is bilaterally symmetrical, because the face is easier to process that way.  We'll take a little jolt in the symmetry, a small change, just to pique our interest -- as long as the overall effect is symmetrical.

So we also love graphics:  triangles showing relationships, lines showing causes, and bar charts showing growth.  We eat these things up.  We find them calming and illuminating.  Anything that helps us clump and find patterns in this confusing world is a good thing.  Any moderator who can take a far-ranging discussion and summarize it in a 2X2 box is a very clever and well-loved moderator.

The research director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Persis Drell, recently told SiliconValley.com:

as the result of the experimental discoveries of the last five years, what we are realizing is this normal matter that we had been studying for 40 years and that we can describe so well actually is only 5 percent of the universe, and 95 percent of the universe is made of forms of matter and energy that we don't have a clue about.

We know nothing about most things.  But we still clump wildly, even about the things about which we know nothing.  Ms. Drell says that in the "bright universe," the known one,

There are 57 particles, lots of forces. We're now sitting here talking about the rest of [the] universe, the 95 percent, as if it's got two components: dark matter and dark energy. And it's pretty arrogant to think that the dark universe would be so simple when the bright universe is so complex.

We can't take in the dark matter -- there's not enough of it to make sense, apparently.  And we're pretty confused about the dark energy too, according to Ms. Drell.  But, true to form, we're finding patterns and clumping away, making sense of our place in the universe. 

Here's the link to internet policy.  Politicians and lawyers constantly simplify what the internet is and what happens there.  It's just a network of networks.  It's a set of IP-enabled applications.  It's a Title I service. 

But it may be that the huge gift economy that has created "it," and the changes "it" is making in the world, is still invisible to us.  (Steven Johnson talked recently about swarming around good causes; this is just the tip of the iceberg.)  We may be seeing only 5% of the online world, just as we understand only 5% of the elements that make up the offline universe.  We should, perhaps, not be so presumptuous as to claim to understand the internet.  On the other hand, we shouldn't be afraid to make optimistic claims about its future.