In defence of walls

Danah Boyd comes to the defence of the Walled Garden – the notion that certain parts of the web be protected from external gaze. It’s certainly a relief to hear someone question the prevailing orthodoxy (open==good, closed==bad).

To reiterate some of Danah’s ground, the very notion of a “wall” has somehow acquired an inherently negative connotation. This is a shame, because it is only by delimiting states and distinguishing between them that we create and perceive value. Value, in its widest sense, is the difference between two states, one state being more desirable than the other. My schoolboy physics reminds me that energy in any system naturally dissipates until everything reaches the same level – a mean steady-state – maximum entropy. So to create localised pockets of interest amidst the bland soup we must inject energy and impose structure. And that’s where walls come in.

Overstretched metaphores aside, the real question in my mind though is not so much whether walled web gardens should admit search bots (quick answer: No – the point of any wall, and the reassurance it provides, is that it is unambiguous in its behaviour), but what degree of granularity do we need for our walls to be truly useful?

Most walled gardens on the web apply to a given online service in whole. You’re either in Facebook, or you’re not. Once inside, you’re more-or-less exposed to the local ecosystem. This is rather crude, and perhaps does little more than confer some vague sense of ‘being in with the in crowd’. Is there not a need for meaningful online walls which reflect our own personal lives? Why can’t I have a walled garden on the web where all the people in my real life do the things we do together? Better still, I wouldn’t mind being able to erect some wooden fences and perhaps a low hedge so that different groups of friends/colleagues/family could have different bits of the garden to themselves. This protected, organised space would thus have genuine value to me and the people inside it by virtue of the structure and trust relationships it is founded on.

On the upside, human interaction naturally promotes these ‘pockets of value’. Good things bubble up out of nowhere all the time, but without an infrastructure of sturdy walls to support them, they will always be fighting random noise and the laws of entropy.