The World Wide
Web and its child, e-commerce, are by now commonplace
features of daily life for millions around the world.
This book by the man who single-handedly invented the
World Wide Web reminds us how recently our e-world
came into being.
Tim Berners-Lee
arranged the marriage of hypertext and the Internet
just nine years ago. His invention became operational
on Christmas Day 1990. He was the first to see his
way to the functioning relationship of these two
technological partners: together they make the Web
and constitute its power. Still only in his forties,
Berners-Lee is now busy thinking up the next on-line
revolution and already has a name for it—the
Semantic Web.
Meanwhile, as
chair of the W3C
(World Wide Web Consortium) domiciled at MIT, he
oversees the development of the Web throughout the
world. His pivotal role in developing W3C
"Proposed Recommendations" for users
everywhere perpetuates the surprising values and
vision that inspired his original invention.
Weaving the
Web is the quintessential
insider’s short history of the birth and early
development of the WWW. It places the now-familiar
entrepreneurial giants of our time—such as Jim
Clark, Bill Gates, Mark Andreesen—in the
landscape as perceived by the e-world’s most
un-entrepreneurial star player.
The author
invented the Web while working at CERN, a famous
European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva,
Switzerland. He went there after his studies in
physics at Oxford. His is a classic case of an
inventive outsider dabbling with an idea peripheral
to the mission of his organization. CERN had marginal
interest in the idea that drove Berners-Lee—to
program his new computer so that he would create
"a space in which anything could be linked to
anything." He persisted, however, and his first
great achievement was to put the CERN telephone book
on a server linked to desktop browsers! CERN
eventually pulled out of its co-sponsorship of the
W3C. But by then Berners-Lee’s vision was a
reality.
He gives us a
down-to-earth account of the creation of now-familiar
referents in the e-world. Only a couple of years ago,
they were esoteric techie jargon. Now they are part
of mainstream talk. He tells, for example, how he
invented the "URL" (he favors URI as a
term), how "http://" became the prefix of
choice, how ".com" and other domains came
to be. How simple he makes it all sound. Yet he and a
band of allies around the world in a couple of years
invented a new space for human action with a new
vocabulary never before imagined.
_________
When the commercial power
of the Web dawned in the early and mid-1990s,
ordinary mortals like those mentioned above followed
their natural lust for gold. Berners-Lee, the man who
made it all possible from his redoubt in Switzerland,
stuck to his dream. He did not set out to make big
bucks. He set out to "help people work
together." (123) In his inclusive view of the
world, that meant helping not only intellectuals but
also entrepreneurs, anyone, in fact.
He does not get
upset, therefore, over the rampant commercialization
that overtook the Web. "The Web was designed as
a universal medium," he calmly reminds us.
"A hypertext link must be able to point to
anything. Information that is put up for commercial
gain can’t be excluded." (107)
He would get
upset, however, if commercial or government forces
began to diminish the ability of anyone to reach
anyone else on the Web. (That is not inconsistent, in
his mind, with charging a fair price to get into a
site.) A passion for universal connection drove
Berners-Lee at the start and still does. It is the
dominant note that rises from his text when all is
said. Against all who would carve up the Web into
privileged sectors technologically inaccessible to
some, against all who would build censorship walls
around it, Berners-Lee remains coolly committed to
"a single, universal, accessible hypertext
medium for sharing information." (76)
This abiding
passion colors his treatment of the sticky issues
that have arisen--charges of monopoly against
Microsoft, the easy avenue that kids find to
cyberporn, the need for privacy in cyberspace.
_________
Berners-Lee had his
obligatory interview on Charlie Rose to promote his
book some months ago. He revealed himself as a
soft-spoken man of modest demeanor, civilized in the
way one would expect a product of Queen’s
College Oxford to be civilized. That appearance makes
the sweep and daring of his thinking all the more
interesting by contrast. He and his colleagues at W3C
think the Semantic Web, when developed, will create
the next big step forward in universal human
connectivity (and, doubtless, the next big bubble of
entrepreneurial optimism).
What is it? He
says the first part of his dream of universality came
when the World Wide Web enabled people to
collaborate. The second part of his dream—the
Semantic Web—will come true when collaboration
extends to computers themselves. The Semantic Web
will be "a web of data that can be processed
directly or indirectly by machines." (177) This
will relieve humans from evaluating and merging data.
To make this
happen, W3C is working on "a common language
that allows computers to represent and share data,
just as HTML allows computers to represent and share
hypertext." (181) Keep an eye out for a new
e-world referent—the RDF (Resource Description
Framework). The RDF will enable computers to
describe, infer and then reason about data anywhere
on the Web. If it sounds like Star Wars, imagine
yourself back to Christmas 1990, the year when
e-commerce did not exist and Berners-Lee launched the
WWW. If he changed our world once, in the face of
incredulity and bureaucratic indifference, you have
to think he might do it again.
_________
Significantly, Berners-Lee
ends his otherwise impersonal account on a personal
note. He tells of becoming a member of the
Universalist Unitarian Church in Boston. He explains
how compatible the environment of "U-Uism"
is with that surrounding his work on the WWW. In that
work he stays focused on the goal of interconnecting
all the people in the world. To reach that goal, he
and others in the effort have to value mutual respect
and collective effort without creating a huge
bureaucratic regime.
Berners-Lee
affirms openness, universality, a non-controlling
system, justice and fairness, evolvability, freedom,
decentralization, diversity of systems. He does not
want to see the WWW lead to a "global uniform
McDonald's monoculture." Nor does he want it to
be the vehicle for "isolated Heaven's Gate
cults" to understand only themselves. (203) His
vision is not of an "overpowering order."
Instead, he sees us incrementally building a new
structure of society in cyberspace. Optimistically,
he believes that this society "could advance
with intercreativity and group intuition rather than
conflict as the basic mechanism." (206)
(Berners-Lee amply illustrates in these remarks the
correspondence between hypertext and the character of
postmodern culture, established by George
Landow.)
This optimistic
vision contradicts the weary Western tradition of
good vs. evil and "them vs. us" in cosmic
conflict. By enabling individuals to be intuitive as
well as analytical in a collective endeavor, the
Semantic Web, he thinks, could change basic
motivations. Berners-Lee thus ends on a near-utopian
note in the process of downplaying such a position.
Though I have
doubts about such an outcome, I admire Berners-Lee's
humanitarian impulses. It is good to know that
someone in a position to influence the further
development of the WWW has strong anti-totalitarian
biases. Berners-Lee seemed to me to underplay the
effect of the WWW on the structure of knowledge in
the academy--he paid greater attention to e-commerce.
Still, if you care about the shape of the world
coming into being, this book has to be on your list.
