Alex Wright - The Web That Wasn't: Looking Back for the Future
Alex Wright, The New York Times information architect and author of the book "Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages", takes questions from Namahn on what we can learn from the Web's precursors about globally accessible information repositories, taxonomies, hierarchies and the evolving dance between oral and literate cultures.
Wright homes in on probably the earliest forefather of the Internet, the 19th century Belgian scientist Paul Otlet, who envisioned a new kind of information system that departed from the conventional library. In 1921, Otlet created the first "paper Internet," known as the Palais Mondiale de Mundaneum, which used staff to retrieve information culled from a variety of sources and catalogued in an index card-based system that was accessible by telegraph from anywhere in the world.
Like Ted Nelson's project Xanadu, developed some 30 years later, Otlet, says Wright, had developed a more sophisticated vision for what eventually became hyperlinks. Namahn asks Wright to speculate on how today's paper-based Internet—a case of technology co-opted into a role for which it wasn't intended— might have been different had the visions of Otlet and Nelson prevailed.
Wright also puts in historical perspective many of the developments around the Internet considered new, from taxonomies to blogs, reminding Namahn that disruptive technologies have evolved in a similar way each time they were introduced. The Gutenberg press also created a period of instability in which people self-organized to subvert the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. But as those networks took shape, new hierarchies arose from them. Wright even traces the ancestry of blogs to the convergence of oral and literate cultures found in the Irish illuminated manuscripts. When Namahn asks Wright to look ahead, he sees the Web encouraging a new kind of oral language pattern of pidgin and shorthand, a mixture of language modes of communication.
Download the interview (mp3, 28:08, 12.8MB, April 2008)
