Technology Thursday
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March 13, 2009 was the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web. Before the Web there were services such as ftp and gopher that allowed access to files stored on servers around the world. Washington University in St. Louis had a massive image/clipart archive named wuarchive. There was no hotmail, no Amazon, no www.anything-at-all. I remember when I saw my first few URLs out in the wild, in a magazine, I think--no longer the province of geeks and computer nerds--and I thought then, and still think now, "this seemingly small thing, a URL on a page, signifies something truly huge."
The Web and the easy on-ramps to the Internet it provides (the Internet's been around a lot longer than the Web; the two should not be confused) is so ever-present now that it's hard to imagine living without it.
And indeed, our kids' world is not just different from the one we grew up in, but it is staggeringly different. Their ways of thinking about information and what to do with ubiquitous access to vast amounts of it will be completely different from ours, in ways we can't even imagine. I have a friend who's 6-year-old knows how to construct search queries in Google that will lead him to the information he wants quickly. It is second-nature to him. Another friend notes that her daughter thinks that all television should have a pause (thanks to digital video recorders) or be able to be seen on the computer (thanks to Youtube and Hulu and such).
Not only does the Web provide access to information, it provides access to people. Long before there were social networking sites, there was instant messaging. And long before that there were multiplayer 'games' that had significant social elements. And before that there was Internet talk (that was a rudimentary form of chat) and message boards and BBSes and all kinds of then-innovative ways for people to find other people and communicate with them. Kids these days [tm] though can have access to their friends, teachers, parents (and strangers) using just their phones anywhere they happen to be. How does their view of the world and their connections to other people in it change because of this? I talk to one of my best buddies from college nearly every single day - we've transitioned our chat medium over the years but have maintained that connection.
I didn't have access to the Internet (pre-Web) until I was 18, so I still marvel that while she and I may see each other only once a year we still manage to keep up with even the minutaie of each other's lives (yes - we have been known to text each other that most trivial of trivial items: what we're having for lunch - it's about ambient awareness, not rampant narcissism!). But our kids - they'll take this sort of thing for granted certainly.
So the Web is 20 years old. As part of the commemoration and recognition of this anniversary, CERN (where Tim Berners-Lee was working when he and colleagues invented the Web) hosted a celebration and made a webcast available. More information can be found here. Scientific American also did a feature on the Web's 20th birthday. Berners-Lee suggests that the Web reflects how our brains work:
isn't that the way we all think? We all follow many unconscious paths at once. Maybe that's why the Web has become so popular. Finally, there is a computer network that operates the way our brains do."
I'm not totally convinced. But I definitely think that the Web is shaping the way we think in ways that will probably only be evident when the kids who grew up with the Web from toddler-hood take over the world. Won't that be interesting?
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