I've got proof ...
(and I even presented it only half a year
ago). Back then the context was quite similar, although the emphasis was different.
In
August of 2005, Tim Berners-Lee was interviewed by Mark Lawson of BBC news. In
that interview Berners-Lee makes it quite clear that from the beginning he envisioned
a high degree of interactivity between reading and writing on the web:
ML: I'm interested that at what sense you began to sense the possibilities.
You weren't thinking car rental, you weren't thinking blogging, I assume.
TBL: Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would
have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it
was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability
to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what
somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.
For
years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't
a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult
and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable
web spaces, was that they became much more simple.
When you write a blog,
you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very
happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative
medium.
This, however, leaves an important question unanswered. Even if we grant that
today's tools make realizing the read/write web much easier than only a few years
ago, is this ease of use enough to make the qualitatively convert a population
of readers to one of reader/writers? The availability of useful and usable tools
seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient, prerequisite. A conceptual change
on the part of web readers, a realization on their part that this
is desirable is necessary before they can become the envisioned reader/writers.
But very little seems to be getting written about how that change it going to
take place.
Go to: Taking the long view, or
Go to:
It's just too Oh!