Comment on The Web We Want and the Stories We Tell by CogDog

Sirius reflections indeed! what a great weaving between the ideas from the writings in the New Media Reader, especially to connect the desired web with the space/potential of comics.

I had some fun this year using the 25 year marker to reflect back and forward on this history. The best find was coming across a TV show from 1993 about the web, featuring a still enthusiastic Howard Rheingold and some interesting forecasts about what the web might become (meaningful for me as that was they year I first clicked into the web):

I went back to a reflection Berners-Lee wrote in 1998 as a “short personal history of the web” in 1998 (http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.html)

“The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.”

To me we’ve reached much of that second part of the dream, with some question of how realistic that mirror is; the web wanting is are we headed towards a place where computers are helping make sense of what we are doing and helping us work better together (very Englebart-ish).

siriusly yours 😉

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