This month marks the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web,
conceived in March 1989 by
English computer scientist and currently MIT professor and director of
the World Wide Web Consortium Tim Berners-Lee, who
is credited with inventing the Web when he was working with Geneva,
Switzerland-based CERN,
the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
Berners-Lee says he can't recall the precise date.
Actually, it wasn't until Christmas 1990 that Berners-Lee's idea
evolved into what would be the blueprint of the World Wide Web, with
the first servers and browsers running at CERN, and the network began
to propagate in earnest through 1991, at first mainly to other particle
physics labs around the World.
Early Internet Experience
It's slightly astonishing at this stage of the game to cognate how
short a time it's been. In 1989, I was two years away from getting my
first computer of any sort, and I was relatively late logging onto the
Internet - a date I do remember precisely - October 31, 1997 - which
was the first day that public Web service penetrated this neck of the
woods. I had dabbled a bit with bulletin boards, but at long distance
telephone rates at the time I couldn't afford to dabble overmuch.
Unfortunately for me, being able to hook up to the Web via
dialup
over slow, rural copper phone lines has remained the state of the art
in my community, although we have been promised wireless broadband
access by the end of this year. That's another movie.
What's Become of the Web?
Anyway, I wonder how Mr. Berners-Lee feels about what's become of
his brainchild. He has many reasons to be proud of it, but I find it a
bit disheartening that such a large proportion of traffic on the World
Wide Web is devoted to trivial pursuits like cruising auction sites,
gaming and social networking, or downright prurient ones like porn and
con games.
According to mobile media research firm M:metrics,
top domains by time spent browsing per month with smartphones in the US
are in descending order: Craigslist,
eBay, MySpace, Facebook, and Disney's go.com, with time spent tallied
at an average of 22 minutes on Craigslist, 29 minutes on eBay, 16
minutes on MySpace, 14 minutes on Facebook, and 18 minutes on Go.com on
days they visited these sites.
Social Networking
Facebook, which celebrated its fifth anniversary last month, has
roughly 175 million users who spend a cumulative total of three billion
minutes on the site every day, which must constitute one of the most
prodigal and colossal wastes of time in human history. No wonder a lot
of people say they are giving up Facebook for Lent this year. In Italy,
several Catholic bishops have urged their flocks to take a Lenten break
from Facebook, et al.
Facebook is one of the most frequented websites today.
A Nielsen Online survey released March 10 found that 67% of web
users frequent social networks and blogs, which now account for 10% of
all time spent on the Internet, with one in every 11 minutes online
spent on a social-network or blog sites and that while general Internet
usage measured in minutes increased by 18%, traffic on "member
communities" ballooned by 63% over a single year.
Increasingly Trivial Pursuits
It brings to mind a comment by the late Malcolm
Muggeridge (in a different context) about being like building an
elaborate exhibition hall for a tiddlywinks tournament. It may even be
hazardous to health, and not just conventional concerns about sedentary
activities, although that alone is a serious matter. A study by the
British Broadcaster Audience Research Board found teenagers now
typically spend seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of screens.
However, Oxford University neuroscientist
Baroness Susan Greenfield, author of Tomorrow's People: How 21st Century Technology is Changing
the Way we Think and Feel, recently briefed the British
Parliament on her theory that due to our tech obsession, "the
mid-21st-century mind might be almost infantilized . . . into
the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and
bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the
moment." Particularly by the psychological effects of social
networking, with developing minds being conditioned to process
rapid-action instant images, and potentially harming their ability to
cope with slower-paced real world social behaviors and interactions
off-screen. Lady Greenfield maintains that member communities like
Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo shorten attention spans, encourage instant
gratification, and make young people more self-centred.
Psychologist Aric Sigman wrote in Biologist magazine that
spending long hours online, combined with with watching TV and videos
and listening to iPods, is leading to loneliness and alienation that
has been linked to diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and dementia.
Wild West or Worldwide Banality?
So I suppose there's a bit of backhanded comfort to be drawn from a
weekend commentary by CTV.ca News' Josh Visser, who suggests that
Facebook addicts may be getting jaded. In a piece titled
"Death by boredom - the slow demise of Facebook", Visser suggests
that Facebook's arc of trajectory could be similar to that of the gold
rush town of Deadwood, South
Dakota, which in the 1870s became a magnet for gunfighters,
gamblers (Wild
Bill Hickok was killed there at a poker game), and women of ill
repute, but subsequently devolved into being "just a tourist trap in
boring ole' South Dakota."
Visser notes that Facebook started out much like the old Wild West -
"open, kind of barren, but people were free to do as they pleased
without much worry of repercussion," with their "ridiculous status
updates, embarrassing photos, nasty late-night wall postings," as well
as the creation of a news feed in September 2006 that allows users to
kibitz what other users are doing - "like picking up a newspaper in the
morning and every article was a gossip story about someone you
knew."
Whatever floats your boat, I suppose.
Entertainment
However, Visser laments that Facebook has slowly (? - it's only five
years old!) evolved into something else that manages to both take up
much more of his time and yet bores him in a way it never did before.
He summarizes: "You know when you put off logging in to Facebook, the
same way you put off taking out the trash, that's not a good sign for
something that's supposed to be entertainment."
Ah well, as George Bernard Shaw observed, "Life would be tolerable
but for its amusements," or as George MacDonald put it: "You
can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and
then the mud." Sorry to sound curmudgeonly. I've never had much
interest in Facebook per se (being stuck on dialup makes the process
painful - never mind the content), but I do comprehend what Visser is
getting at - sort of.
Domesticating the World Wide Web
The early years of the Internet were indeed a bit like the frontier
before lawmen tamed it - a free space with few rules and little
civilization. Some people found this untamedness exciting and
invigorating - others frightening and unsettling. As the late Steve
McQueen put it in the revisionist movie western, Tom Horn, the
Old West was a "raggedy-assed" place.
The Internet, in its early stages of evolution, is pretty
raggedy-assed too. Some like it that way, while others want to hang all
the cyber-bandits, domesticate the cyber-Indians, and make the Internet
a congenial, orderly, law-abiding place for cyber-bankers,
cyber-lawyers, cyber-merchants, and cyber-entertainlers - not to
mention cyber-politicians and cyber-tax collectors.
Which is why there's a little tiny bit of me that smiles whenever
the hacker fraternity mischievously pricks the balloon. I'm not talking
about malicious destruction here, just the welcome deflation of
establishmentarian gatekeeping. I'm
not philosophically or temperamentally an anarchist, but I do believe
that he who governs best governs least.
Can a balance be struck between the soul-deadening oppression of Big
Brotherdom and chaotic anarchy? I would like to think so.
