Understanding Information and Computation

The World Wide Web is the largest sociotechnical system humankind has ever seen; it has changed the way we interact, learn and innovate. Almost daily it appears to change, improve and increase its hold on us. We are, though, seeing underlying stability emerge. The way Web sites rank in popularity, for example, appears to follow familiar laws. These are not laws solely constrained to computer science or information technology, however, but are also seen in fundamental disciplines like biology, physics and mathematics. The Web, synthetic at its surface, seems to be quite 'natural' deeper down, and one of the driving aims of Web Science is to discover how far down such ’naturalness’ goes. If the central properties of the Web are more elemental than first thought, we might have to question things like the very nature of information. Understanding Information and Computation is about such questions and some mind-blowing answers.