LZZR

February 29, 2008

Those who cannot remember Web 1.0 are condemned to repeat it

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
from "Reason in Common Sense", the first volume by George Santayana
not my favourite philosopher, I admit, but the quote is too good not to use it

Well, of course there is no new thing under the sun but problems we are facing with the rapid introduction of Web 2.0 are even more severe than those arising at the time its predecessor Web 1.0 took over the world. In its early days Web 1.0 looked like a mysterious cyberspace inhabited by semi-robotic creatures travelling over the paths of hyperlinks. Overexcited zealots preached nothing short of digital revolution and it might have been looking very much reasonable at the time. All that existed in real world seemed to be easy to digitise and place on the InterWeb (where else?). This was imagined as nothing short of a parallel reality both mimicking the real world and obscuring it. It looked as if some sort of parallel reality is about to be born. Matrix (the movie) comes as perhaps the best illustration of the spirit of the time. At the time it looked indeed like a second virtual reality structurally opposed to the real world coming into being. Now we may look back and see how exaggerated this whole thing was, how much fantasy was projected into something that was not even nearing this image.

So, what was in fact this Web 1.0? We need to look at it now with the benefit of hindsight as without the clear understanding of Web 1.0 all talks about subsequent versions of the InterWeb will inevitably just produce an equivalent amount of hype that can only obscure the reality. At the foundation of Web 1.0 lied HTML. And it was just this – a HyperText Markup Language – perhaps the most crippled computer language ever devised it could only do what it says on the tin. Tied up with HTTP protocol in an inseparable mass this HTTP/HTML alloy was placed right in the foundation of the WWW and that’s exactly the kind of burden we have to carry into the future. In those early days the vision of the Internet was no more than just a collection of texts enhanced, in comparison to paper texts, with the ability to link otherwise separate documents with hyperlinks. No more nor less. Behind it was still the idea of printed books. The whole Internet looked as a huge library with universal 24/7 access. More importantly all content structure of the Internet itself was also modelled from printed books, with web sites being in a way similar to specialised libraries and their directories being books with web pagers clearly standing as separate documents with separate single titles and the continent was assumed to be linear and one-dimensional.

The same concept of linearity applies to larger Internet structures. The general assumption was that the content is guided by principles of linear narrative, or in other words that it should be read from the beginning to the end and from top to bottom. Actually it was assumed that any given piece of content must have its beginning its body and its end. Once again we are dealing with an idea of a written text that originated in classic literature of 19^th century. So at this stage, search engines appear as a form of a catalogue allowing quick keyword search through those structured and subject oriented texts.

Now we have a library, a catalogue, and we have users, who are not even users just yet, they are only readers. And what those readers could do in that global library? Well, only what they were supposed to do, and they were supposed to read. HTTP protocol allows read-only access. HTML language was not designed for constant editing of documents. What advertised itself as second reality turned out to be just an enormous collection of texts.

This created a certain type of user self identity that would have been better characterised by the word of the time: a visitor. The state of an Internet user formed at this stage could be seen as completely anonymous passive recipient, an invisible traveller, a museum visitor who is only allowed to see objects, but never allowed even to touch, not to say to modify them. Production of Web content was primarily limited to a very tiny circle of Internet professionals and was out of reach for those who viewed their computer as just a sophisticated typewriter. Static pages, passive visitors, huge catalogues, plus constant buzz about virtual reality - that’s how our beginnings look like.

It’s not that Web 2.0 came out of nowhere. Changes amassed gradually within a period that might be called Web 1.5. First your typewriter with a screen turned into a multimedia PC - remember how a simple addition of a soundcard and CD-ROM overturned the whole concept of this device? Now text stopped being the only possible continent on the Net. With it came filesharing for which neither HTTP, nor HTML were designed and which required user authentication. Two other things, contributing to these changes were e-commerce and interactivity.

E-commerce was perhaps the most significant in breaking through the virtual barrier as it provided a bridge between the real world and that virtual reality, previously separate from it. Now you could find a virtual object in this virtual world, provide your real details, pay with your real credit card and a week later a postman would bring it to your doorstep in a form of a very tangible real object - the first and perhaps the most important breakthrough in this real vs. virtual dichotomy. Real credentials placed in a virtual world and a virtual world producing a real object in return, that’s a very demystificating experience. In addition, our visitor for the first time became active, online shopping required definite actions and produced tangible real-world results of those actions.

But what finally turned our visitor into a proper user was interactivity, where bulletin boards and forums are perhaps paramount examples of the genre. It’s there the final transformation took place – now our visitor could quickly switch from an invisible observer to active and personified participant. Nicknames, usernames, passwords and avatars all suddenly became attributes of nearly everyone who ever spent some time on the net. Now another state of internet presence emerged – instead of having a homepage user became accustomed to having profiles. Notably, those two are differently related to the concept of online self: if the former was about that very self and presented some text or images produced by that self, the latter is actually a facet of online self or at least being perceived as such. For the first time profiles established not "is authored by me" but "is me" relation between online self and a URL. In other words, "this URL is me in syberspace".

Although being scattered all over different services these profile pages became constituent parts of a new type of online personality representation which is different in kind to the one provided by homepages only. Bulletin boards and forums or, broadly speaking all that comes under the term interactivity, also changed the type of content, adding to the previously prevalent linear narrative a different tree-like conversational structure that came not out of planned writing of a single individual (author) but as a result of a conversation between an indefinite number of participants.

This collectively produced content had no single author, no linear structure and perhaps no pre-defined narrative structure at all, as even if a particular subject in forum discussion might have a beginning, it surely has no end and at any time can stroll away from the initial subject to some off-topic deviations that may sometimes never to come back to the initial point. This type of content better known as "user generated content" is fluid, dynamic, progressive and growing and only this variety content can be seen as truly and genuinely specific to the Internet.

In the same way as printing revolution produced after some time a bunch of literary forms from pamphlet to a novel, the Internet, or better computer revolution, begins to produce its own specific modes of existence for written word, changing on the way the meaning and the perception of the written word as such. In many respects it is the most significant cultural consequence of this revolution and I promise to discuss it in more detail in a piece on Search Engines I am planning to write next.

Suffice to mention for now that as a result of this our visitors or guests became gradually trained to act as users, they now expect to be identified and recognised, expect to be able to contribute to almost anything, expect to be able to leave a trace either in a form of a comment or in "last visited" logs, expect to be seen when online and addressed by their fellows. This gradually turned the perception of the net from being a tool of information dissemination to the one of active real-time communication. Instant Messaging too contributed to this training albeit in an indirect form. Remarkably, it’s been brilliantly reflected in traditional paper literature already in the book Loneliness on the Net by Janusz Wiśniewski.

Needless to remind here that for all these activities neither HTTP nor HTML were designed, but in the absence of native solutions twisted and crooked implementations of HTML and HTTP became common practice to such a degree that to this day we all prefer to turn a blind eye on the perverse nature of these solutions.
Please, consider this being a first part of a larger article that I just had to split as otherwise it would be over 7000 words To be continued…