What the Internet Is For
Summary: I read this piece in Vodafone Receiver by David Weinberger and wished I had written it! Fortunately, he was kind enough to grant me permission to reproduce it here. David is a Fellow at Harvard?s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and speaks around the world on the effects of the Web. He has been a philosophy professor, marketing consultant, political advisor, and dot.com entrepreneur. He co-authored The Cluetrain Manifesto and is the author of Everything Is Miscellaneous and Small Pieces Loosely Joined—A Unified Theory of the Web. This post is an excerpt from the kids’ version of the same book.
What the Web Is For
David Weinberger
http://www.evident.com
The Web is a web because of hyperlinks that connect the pages. But every hyperlink expresses someone?s interests and recommendations. If you were to make a map of the Web, showing all the sites and all the links, you would be making a map of things the 500 million people on the Web find interesting.
That?s a lot different than a map of the real world that shows where the mountains are and where the oceans end and land begins. The real world map shows what we humans have been given to work with. The Web shows what we have chosen to care about.
And that?s exactly what?s so special about the Web place. It is made not out of mountains, oceans, deserts and forests. It is made out of humans caring about things together. That last word is important: “together”. The Web is in fact a new place for us to be humans together. On the Web, we can be together in new ways.
In a sense that?s obvious. The Web gave us email, which is a new way for us to connect with one another. And it gave us chat rooms, and instant messaging. You and a friend could even set up web video cameras and wave to each other online. These are all new ways of connecting.
But that?s not what?s so exciting and important about the Web.
The Web is a different sort of place. But why has it kicked up a fuss like nothing else in 50 years?
Ask yourself: when are we humans at our best? When are you proudest of being who you are? If you wanted human beings to make a really great impression on Martian visitors, what would you take the Martians to see?
I think I?d take the Martians to see us taking care of one another. I might show them parents walking with a newborn baby on their shoulder late at night, trying to get the baby back to sleep. Or volunteers hammering together a house for someone whose life will be changed by it. Or the way we automatically stop for someone who has tripped and ask if they?re ok. Or perhaps how an entire nation gives food and medicine to a country across the ocean. It?s when we?re caring for one another that we?re at our best.
When we?re at our best we?re also the most human. You wouldn?t understand us if you never saw us at our best, any more than you could understand a basketball if you only saw it deflated and flat.
We are only human because we?re connected to other humans. If you were brought up on a desert island, you would grow up and hardly be human at all. You?d have no words and no ideas beyond which plants taste good and which bugs taste bad. You would be perhaps the worst example to show a Martian trying to understand us humans.
We are human because we are connected to other humans. And why do we connect? Because as humans we care about each other and about our world. Statues don?t care what happens to them. Robots don?t care. Humans do. We care together.
It can be hard to connect in the real world because space keeps us apart. Until the invention of the telephone, the only people you could connect with were the people who lived near you. You could write letters, but usually you were writing to people you already knew. And the same is true for the telephone: we almost always call people we know. In the real world, our connections have usually been to the people who happen to live around us: our family, our neighbors, the people who go to our school or to where we worship.
There?s obviously something very important about living among the people who are near us. We get to know our family and our neighbors very well because their nearness means that we run into them every day or every week. And the fact that you can walk down a sidewalk and bump into someone you like can turn a chore into fun.
Nevertheless, the real world makes it hard to connect and generally limits us to the people near us.
The Web makes it insanely easy to connect. We can meet someone from the other side of the world literally as easily as a neighbor down the street. Of course, we probably won?t get to know our Web friend as well as we know our real world friends. But the connections we make on the Web are valuable to us in a different way.
In the real world, we meet people who happen to live nearby. On the Web, we meet people because they share an interest. For example, we may be searching the Web for information about a particular sea shell because that?s something we care about. In our search we find a Web page that talks about how to make jewelry out of shells. At that site, there may be a place where you can write a question and other people around the world can respond. Everyone who writes in cares about shells. That?s why they?re at this site. You have instantly found a group of people who are interested in what you?re interested in. You have connected based not on the fact that you happen to live in the same place but because you both care about the same thing.
So, here we have two worlds. In the real world, people are kept apart by distance. Because of the vastness of the earth, different cultures have developed. People live in separate countries, divided by boundaries and sometimes by walls with soldiers and guns. On the Web, people come together ? they connect ? because they care about the same things.
The real world is about distances keeping people apart. The Web is about shared interests bringing people together.
Now, if connecting and caring are what make us into human people, then the Web ? built out of hyperlinks and energized by people?s interests and passions ? is a place where we can be better at being people.
And that is what the Web is for.
