<nettime> The World Wide Web 30 years later: We Wove a Tangle (Guardian Editorial)

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/11/the-guardian-view-on-the-world-wide-web-we-wove-a-tangle



The Guardian view on the world wide web: we wove a tangle  (Guardian 
Editorial)
Mon 11 Mar 2019


Thirty years ago, a physicist dreamed up a way to organise information 
from multiple computers all on one screen. The world will never be the 
same


For once, the hype was justified. The world wide web really did 
transform the world in a way that can be compared to the impact of the 
printing press, or the mass media of the 20th century. The internet 
existed before the web, of course, but it was hardly used. The genius of 
Tim Berners-Lee was to glimpse, 30 years ago this week, how it might be 
brought to life by a simple scheme to allow every part to find, and talk 
with, every other part, using words, sounds, pictures or anything else 
that can be digitised.

This was useful enough. Two further developments made it indispensable. 
The first was the development of graphical browsers, allowing the web to 
be navigated through pictures with a mouse; the second was its indexing 
and organisation by search engines.
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A world in which anyone can publish anything to anyone else falls 
rapidly into overwhelming chaos. A corresponding demand for order soon 
appears. This was answered within 10 years, when the babel of the early 
web was mapped and by this mapping shaped by the first search engines, 
and eventually by the latecomer Google. Google’s original advantage was 
that it understood and worked with the central innovation of the web, 
which was the link. There had been multimedia forms of computing before 
the web, and for some years they provided a much better experience, too. 
But Sir Tim’s invention disrupted not merely the business of multimedia 
but the substance of it, too. Once anything on the web could be linked 
to anything else, what was displayed on screen could consist of little 
fragments brought together from computers all over the world.

This discovery was later the foundation of the modern advertising 
economy; and the web has nourished the growth of digital advertising 
until it will be larger in the US than all other forms put together this 
year. It has also made possible the sizeable malware industry. The 
linking at the heart of the web has fundamentally changed the way that 
we understand the construction of knowledge. It has of course also made 
possible the construction of counterknowledge, but as Sir Tim points out 
in his letter to mark the 30th anniversary of his idea, the use of 
propaganda by hostile states or even malicious individuals was not 
invented with the internet. Leni Riefenstahl made her films before 
Donald Trump was even born.

What seems to Sir Tim to subvert the whole intention of the web has been 
its capture by the attention economy, in which the interest of the 
public becomes the only measure of success, however much damage this may 
do to the public interest. The underlying protocols of the web, and its 
ability to link content of every kind from everywhere into an apparently 
seamless whole, emerged from a largely benevolent academic atmosphere. 
They seemed to its early users to be animated by the values of the 
communities that built them. In the last 30 years we have learned that 
they were not. The same protocols allow this page to be read and the 
surveillance cameras of Xinjiang to maintain the police state there. But 
it would be wrong to say the technology is entirely neutral. By 
shortening the loop between urge and action, the web has had a 
particularly infantilising effect on its users. This is reflected in the 
extraordinary degree of polarisation, and indeed cruelty, seen online. 
It is an impulse uncontroller. It has brought enormous benefits to 
society and will continue to do so. But it has also done harm. Society, 
and all of us, must also discover a degree of maturity if these great 
powers are not to work against us.



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