Getting There: Landing an Onion on Mars

Abstract

To try to simplify the ideas in this book it is helpful to visualize this informational ecosystem in layers. To aid in this one might imagine a metaphor to describe the involved dynamic and continuous process. It is somewhat of a two-part metaphor to be specific. The first part is the layered onion: a common enough metaphor and therefor an effective metaphor. The second part is the difficulty involved in the process of flying a spacecraft to places beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Landing an onion on Mars, of course, has a certain element of humor and jest to it, but it works. As a two-part metaphor it makes sense because when we are working with building a Web ecosystem we are first working with the apparatus, that is, the desktop, laptop, or mobile device that will be used to build and operate the product we are working to construct. This is our onion. The modern computer and everything it does functions in a way that we can think about in layers: there is a lot going on around the surface, but what happens here is a result of deeper layers that are doing an important amount of work.