Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Thu 10 Nov 2005 01:31 AM PST
We Are the Web
By Kevin Kelly
© Wired Magazine
Issue 13.08
August 2005
Click for original article in Wired
(Page 1 of 5)
Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge
piles of money. The brilliant flash revealed what had been invisible
only a moment before: the World Wide Web. As Eric Schmidt (then at Sun,
now at Google) noted, the day before the IPO, nothing about the Web;
the day after, everything.
Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush
outlined the Web's core idea - hyperlinked pages - in 1945, but the
first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named
Ted Nelson who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, he had
little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his
efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples. Few of the
hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about
Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.
At the suggestion of a computer-savvy
friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape.
We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting
a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands.
Folded notes erupted from his pockets, and long strips of paper slipped
from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around
his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the
afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of
humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up 3 x 5 cards, of which he had
plenty.
Although Nelson was polite, charming,
and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from
his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document
in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers
could make the links between them visible and permanent. But that was
just the beginning! Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out
complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and
tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what
he called the docuverse. He spoke of "transclusion" and
"intertwingularity" as he described the grand utopian benefits of his
embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity.
I believed him. Despite his quirks,
it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday.
But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises
me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar
Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all
missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was
only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a
new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging
culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by
hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part
machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.
Not only did we fail to imagine what
the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the
miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web
really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next
10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires
that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.
1995
Before the Netscape browser
illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for most people. If it
was acknowledged at all, it was mischaracterized as either corporate
email (as exciting as a necktie) or a clubhouse for adolescent males
(read: pimply nerds). It was hard to use. On the Internet, even dogs
had to type. Who wanted to waste time on something so boring?
The memories of an early enthusiast
like myself can be unreliable, so I recently spent a few weeks reading
stacks of old magazines and newspapers. Any promising new invention
will have its naysayers, and the bigger the promises, the louder the
nays. It's not hard to find smart people saying stupid things about the
Internet on the morning of its birth. In late 1994, Time magazine
explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: "It was not
designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new
arrivals." Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995
headline: "THE INTERNET? BAH!" The article was written by
astrophysicist and Net maven Cliff Stoll, who captured the prevailing
skepticism of virtual communities and online shopping with one word:
"baloney."
This dismissive attitude pervaded a
meeting I had with the top leaders of ABC in 1989. I was there to make
a presentation to the corner office crowd about this "Internet stuff."
To their credit, they realized something was happening. Still, nothing
I could tell them would convince them that the Internet was not
marginal, not just typing, and, most emphatically, not just teenage
boys. Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP, delivered the ultimate putdown:
"The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," he told me, a charge
he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC's argument for
ignoring the new medium: "You aren't going to turn passive consumers
into active trollers on the Internet."
I was shown the door. But I offered
one tip before I left. "Look," I said. "I happen to know that the
address abc.com has not been registered. Go down to your basement, find
your most technical computer guy, and have him register abc.com
immediately. Don't even think about it. It will be a good thing to do."
They thanked me vacantly. I checked a week later. The domain was still
unregistered.
While it is easy to smile at the
dodos in TV land, they were not the only ones who had trouble imagining
an alternative to couch potatoes. Wired did, too. When I examine issues
of Wired from before the Netscape IPO (issues that I proudly edited), I
am surprised to see them touting a future of high production-value
content - 5,000 always-on channels and virtual reality, with a side
order of email sprinkled with bits of the Library of Congress. In fact,
Wired offered a vision nearly identical to that of Internet wannabes in
the broadcast, publishing, software, and movie industries: basically,
TV that worked. The question was who would program the box. Wired
looked forward to a constellation of new media upstarts like Nintendo
and Yahoo!, not old-media dinosaurs like ABC. ...
(continued in top-level comments to this article)
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