Alex Wright on "The Web That Wasn't"

When the Internet opened up to commercial use in the early 1990s, the World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee was on-hand to provide an unsophisticated, open and easy markup language to link hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. But was it the best system? Were there alternatives? Could our interconnectivity experience be different? As history shows it is not always the best system or design that wins … Domination comes from a marriage of fortunate circumstances: market forces, luck and timing being just three. The same was true of the Web.

In the 16th Namahn Lecture, Alex Wright, Information Architect at The New York Times and author of "Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages", argued that history could have produced any number of alternatives. In his lecture, Wright explored the Web’s lineage and argued that by understanding what might have been, we can help shape the Web’s future.

A recurring theme in every Web precursor cited by Wright is social, collaborative, creative and transparent information sharing. This was often colored by a Utopian vision on the part of the thinker, inventor or scientist who believed, for example, that world peace could be attained or that people could be liberated of institutional constraints through knowledge sharing. However, the Web we know today was not designed for users as creators or for groups: it is the domain of the individual. Even so, with Web 2.0, a growing number of websites are trying to address issues raised time and again by the Web 'pioneers'.

In the seventh of our series of Namahn Interviews podcasts, Joannes Vandermeulen discusses "The Web That Wasn't: Looking Back for the Future" with Alex Wright of The New York Times.