The inventor of the World Wide Web says its size and power over
society have become so great that we no longer fully comprehend
how it works - but he has a solution
by Paul Marks
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under
the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks
asked him what he hopes to achieve
Why did you decide to subject the web itself to scientific scrutiny?
Web science is already happening. People are studying the effect of
the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology
and law. Our Web Science Research Initiative aims to bring that
research together. There are converging web-related issues cropping
up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of
thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web
combine as a whole - until now.
What do you hope to achieve with the Web Science Research Initiative?
The web is now a massive system of connected people and technology
and we have to study it as one. It connects people as they make and
follow hyperlinks to a degree that results in complex properties no
one expected. It has something like 10^11 web pages in it and there
are a similar number of neurons in the brain. The brain is something
very complicated we don't understand - yet we rely on it. The web
is very complicated too and, though we built it, we have no real data
about the stability of the emergent systems that have cropped up on
it.
How does understanding these emergent systems affect society?
Because if you get it right, you can create a new social phenomenon
that changes how people operate. Take designing an online market for
second-hand goods: if you get the website's balance of social and
technical wrong, or mess up its trust and reputation model, it won't
work. But if you get it right, you create a market for used goods
internationally that can affect the price of products around the world
because it provides the price of the second-hand alternative. It is a
web phenomenon that changed the way society works, and we need a
science to understand it.
Isn't this better studied in the well-established field of
computer-human interaction?
Some in that field are addressing some of these issues, but it is not
just about the way information is presented through an interface. Web
science is seeking a broad, systems-level view. We need
cross-fertilisation between different disciplines.
Will web science improve online security?
There are no one-word answers to security. Security permeates
everything, so there are possible attacks on everything. Some security
problems are related to complex systems in social networks. For
instance, phishing is about an inadequate connection to human trust,
making people think they are talking to a bank when it just looks like
the bank.
Will it help people trust websites?
In some ways, yes, but that's a bit like asking a cognitive scientist
if they can cure warts. Early on there was no encryption but we now
have cryptographic protocols to secure communications over the
internet. Phishing was an attack few people expected and we are now
much better at defending against it with browser bars that warn of
certificate errors. Web science will help on issues like security by
identifying microscopic problems and linking them to the macroscopic
ones.
Your invention has allowed anonymous whistleblowing sites like
Wikileaks to spring up. Will web science help maintain the
anonymity of those who take a stand?
Well, whistleblowing is an example of the web's collective
intelligence and web science needs to study it. But it is very
difficult to make a foolproof anonymiser. Frankly, it's a bit hairy to
be in that game. Anonymised data about people is deceptive and is
rather dangerous because the more datasets you can compare one set of
data with, the more likely you are to be able to identify the people
in it.
Profile
Tim Berners-Lee read physics at the University of Oxford. In 1989 at
CERN, the particle physics lab in Switzerland, he proposed a global
hypertext project which became the World Wide Web. He is a co-director
of the Web Science Research Initiative, a joint venture with
headquarters at the University of Southampton and MIT
(www.webscience.org)
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