It is Tim Berners-Lee’s world; we just live in it. But you’d never get that impression from Sir Tim himself, the man who invented the World Wide Web barely a decade ago with nary a thought of power or glory, fame or fortune. 
He runs the World Wide Web Consortium from a modest academic suite of offices at MIT. He’s an accessible scientist who speaks warily, almost defensively, about the miracle he wrought. It is his pleasure, or perhaps his habit by now, to tell you what the Web is not.
The Web is not, first, what Tim Berners-Lee thought he was designing in the early ’90s: a collaborative medium for researchers working together at a distance. That part, for a variety of technical and legal reasons, just didn’t work. Neither is the Web a superhighway of anything, if the highway motif makes you think of concrete, steel, and fixed routes to anywhere. The Web is not, and must never be, the avenue of a monoculture. It is not the outline of a universal brain that will reduce human beings to mere neurons in a Global Mind. It is not a monument to the “Me Decade.” That is, it’s not all about expressive blogging. Or rather: it’s equally about listening and learning. It is about them as much as it’s about us. It is not, he insists, a structure. It is not an active agent–even as it kicks into the cultural and political life of the United States in the presidential decision year of 2004.
“The general public is seizing on the Web as a way to have a conversation,” he said in our own chat this week. “That for me is very inspiring. It doesn’t tell me something about the Web. It tells me something about humanity. The hope for humanity is that people do want to work things out. They do want to come to common understandings, and they will do it by constantly refining the way they’ve expressed their own ideas–and occasionally, on a good day, listening to the way other people have expressed theirs.”
Sir Tim uses the word “fractal” a lot. We live in a fractal world, he kept saying, meaning a world of many levels of structure, where the shapes of mountains often resemble the shapes of sand grains at a different scale; or giant clouds replicate tiny puffs of steam, or human communities at the village level tell you about affinities and tensions at a global level. One of his most compelling digressions was the thought that we should organize our days accordingly. We should live some part of our lives in each of the human orders of magnitude: from the family unit of six to the global population of six billion. Spend a few moments of the day with a consciousness of our individuality, then our closest family circle, our 60-member squad, platoon or company, our 600-member church, our 6000-citizen village in a 60,000-citizen city, in a 600,000 metropolitan area in a 6-million member state; then: our 60-million nation on a 600-million continent, and on to our full species extension.
At each of those levels, and others in-between, we human beings have a distinctive place in a different structure. Perhaps the main message from Tim Berners-Lee at this moment of the Web’s further emergence is simply this: that it serves the conversation at each and every level of a fractal society and a fractal universe. It remains a blank page –a means of getting human clusters of infinite variety on the same page. The nightmare is that it might deliver human experience to the world the way McDonalds delivers burgers, but at this early state of the Web’s evolution, it does not seem a real prospect, not at least to Tim Berners-Lee. “What’s great is to see this diversity of what’s coming out of it. And the diversity does not seem to be slowing down in any way.”
Our conversation is in two files here: Part One on the surprises between the first conception and real growth of the Web. And Part Two on the ways in which the Web may yet realize the visions of diverse geniuses and prophets from Walt Whitman to Teilhard de Chardin.
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How might we get other Boston Public Library staff to use the format of the weblog to let public libraries users/clientele know more of the BPL’s treasured individual staff’s expertise and interests?…
There’s the usual resistance of a kind associated with people in public service.
See also
Collaborative WebLog
A Guide to Problematical Library Use
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.us
—–Original Message—–
From: Paul S Prueitt [mailto:paul@ontologystream.com]
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 8:15 AM
To: Jim Hendler
Cc: Bernard Vatant; BCNGroup Board; Harold H. Szu; Kelcy Allwein;
Michael Lissack; Mike McDonald; Paul Werbos; Peter Kugler; Ralph
Hodgson; Sandy Klausner; Steve Cook; Steven R. Newcomb
Subject: alternative to AI/Semantic Web research
Professor Jim Hendler
University of Maryland, College Park
Respectfully,
I value your work, and you a great deal. But I ask also that you understand what the method is that I have chosen to employ to try to shift some small percentage of federal funding in support of an alternative to AI/Semantic Web research.
I have made a fictional account of a conversation at:
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/techInnovation/thirtyone.htm
based on email we exchanged yesterday. Your name is not mentioned, as this is unimportant to the discussion.
At
http://www.bcngroup.org/beadgames/techInnovation/thirtytwo.htm
we state an alternative to the AI/Sematic Web vision for the future.
Our position is that human thought is a physical phenomenon and logic is not.
In the BCNGroup alternative to AI/SW we positively address the issue of long-term abuse from one community onto another community, and (perhaps more importantly) an alternative to the AI/Semantic Web vision for the future. Once the light of day is shone on this abuse issue, then our society will be able to move on to a more rational expenditure of funds on communication systems.
In this alternative, the growth of computer science funding levels off and then sharply is reduced as the task of creating a functional understanding of what a computer can do and not do is codified in practice. The first step is a requested $60,000,000 to create a Knowledge Science K-12 curriculum.
The alternative, to the AI/SW vision for the future, conjectures that the social/economic energy now spent in confusion, over what a computer can do, will be spent in the proper application of human-centric information production (HIP) on critical social problems such as those creating asymmetric threats and poverty and environmental degradation.
The immediate value proposition is not a business proposition, but a National Security one.
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Tim Berners-Lee ha dado tanto al mundo. Hacer de ella un lugar donde cualquier persona llegar a otro
Wow, this was a really quality post. In theory I’d like to write like this too – taking time and real effort to make a good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate a lot and never seem to get something done.
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The Tim Berner’s contribution to internet neds to scale to his nex level. The www standar is a lot of commercial by now but is needed to make some changes.
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Chris, you know, I’ve always wondered EXACTLY how the web got started – and by who. This interview finally puts ALL my queries to bed – and I thank you for that. I could have googled it I guess – but never did – then I came across this interview. It has given me far more than a google search could have.
I’ll finish off by saying “How the World Has Changed – forever…and all thanks to Tim Berners-Lee.
we love you for all you have given to mankind Mr Lee.
It’s not very often you see or hear anything on the person that gets credit for inventing the world wide web – it’s good to learn a little about the man, nice job.
Tim Berners-Lee is right we are seeing fractious-ness in the web, we can be very unique and sales silos are one example, a person who loves green ties can talk to the whole world about green ties….in one day.
Good tribute to the inventor of the world wide web.
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He simply rocks!!
The web not real life. But you can still collect some information.
Many thanks for the interessting interview. I recently meet some friends of Tim berners Lee while beeing on Aida Kreuzfahrten and it was very interessting to hear their thoughts and the upcomming inventions that will come with the next years.
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ou introduce him to on his first day at MIT
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Thanks for all the ideas from others. Truly, this is informative and useful post. keep on posting!
What person in the world has been more responsible for the greatest revolution in the history of the world and yet is such a low key figure in comparison with the industry moghuls who have piggy-backed on his invention.
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Thanks for this Lyon….
roduce him to on his first day at MIT? Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Wolfgang Ketterle
his first day at MIT? Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Wolfgang Ketterle
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This was one of the best interview of Tim Berners Lee I’ve got to listen to
Do You mind if I translate this interview and put it on my blog?
Lets face it, if this man did not exist would we all be here reading this now?
thank you for post, great blog.
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What an inspiring man! A genuis is Tim berners Lee!
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Tim Berner’s has major part in the www, a significant contribution to it, we thank him, by the way excellent article, easy read and well composed.
I’m really a fan of Tim Berners-Lee.
Smile at Tim Berners-Lee for what had done for all of us with the web.
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