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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