Hierarchies Matter

Bear with me on this one.

I was chatting with Joe Ravo, a guitarist who also happens to be a computer tech wizard, and we got to talking about the start of the internet. Back in the 1960s and 70s, the US military began a project called ARPANET. One of their goals was to decentralize communications, so that in the event of war the military's communication would not be wiped out with one hit.

Likewise, with the present-day internet, we like to think there is a lot of decentralization. But is it so? Google's way of codifying the internet gives priority to web sites that attract a lot of attention. For instance, Google recognize's that more people are likely to search for Wendy's, the fast food chain, rather than my friend Wendy. Google understands the importance of forming data into a hierarchy. If Google gets taken out, that's going to affect the internet a lot more than my friend Wendy's web site disappearing.

Joe and I talked about the nature of things being broken up but returning to their natural order -- another example is AT&T. In the early 1980s the company was broken up into smaller pieces. Here today in 2007 it is back together, stronger than ever.


(Joe Ravo recommended the book Linked for more on this subject.)

Well, for whatever reason, this reminded me of tonality. In the 20th Century, there was an attempt to decentralize tonality. From now on, music would not be organized into a hierarchy of key and chord progressions. But something there is about human nature and the nature of music, the way we listen, that drives us back to organizing music into a hierarchy of, if not key exactly, related notes and motifs.