WWW as self-organizing system

This paper contains a short introduction to the World Wide Web (WWW) and suggests a number of concepts for analyzing it. The concepts are mainly borrowed from theories of self-organizing complex systems. It is tentatively suggested that it may be useful to define a new class of (semi)autopoietic systems, namely technical autopoietic systems that are different from, but on the same level, as other types of autopoietic systems, such as biological, psychic and social systems. The main motivation for this claim is that WWW exhibits some, but not all, features of systems that are normally called autopoietic. These features include self-reference, recursion, lack of central controlling agency, integration of use and evolution, dynamics, and a tendency towards autonomous processes.