what is the web

[Albert Lunde]

At 3:14 PM -0500 4/11/97, Joe Schallan wrote:
>PS.  A few days ago I raised the issue of the nature of the
>web and our professional response to it.  Whether it is
>a single, multifaceted resource, a collection of resources
>that can be viewed as being "selectable," or a sort of data
>pipeline for which we serve as a telco-like carrier are questions
>that cut to the heart of our difficulties with the web.
>
>I was astonished and disappointed that there has been *zero*
>discussion of this.  So everyone out there has quickly decided
>exactly what it is and how it should be handled, eh?

It may not be discussed because it is such a big question (and I'd remind
people that beyond "What is the web?" is the question "What is the
Internet?" which is a more complex question with a longer history.)

The web is not a single resource, but a sampling from alomost every area of
human activity. It is not, in general, an organized collection, though it
has structure inherited from the organizations that created it.

I'd suggest thinking about HTML/HTTP web pages, as being a new publishing
medium, like the printing press. (And like the printing press, it is being
used for controversial purposes from the start: politics, pornography,
religion, ...) (or the Xerox machine)

The Internet is an enabling technology that has created many new media. The
"web" in a broader sense is a interface to a number of these new media.
http, netnews, and e-mail are the big three but the are a *lot* more, some
being created right now.

One of the mistakes people warned against in a discussion of Internet
marketing was thinking of the net as a uniform "mass market".

The hysteria over Internet porn is a variant of this, in that it often
treats the net as if it were a single thing to be controlled in a simple
way.

I'm reminded in a way of the efforts in the Soviet Union to control copy
machines and personal computers or in China to control faxes.  Tools that
do things with information are powerful and hard to control/channel, but
the price of not using them is unacceptable in the long term.

(I realized it sounds like I may be arguing two sides of this issue, but I
can see various angles to it.)


---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde at nwu.edu