Charting The Digital Revolution

This is examined in ... "Digital Revolution (working title), a landmark series of programmes for BBC Two that examines precisely this question." - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8144570.stm.

This article and TV series in the making tries to bridge the gap between the media of TV and the web. So the program will also be online and interactive. This charts the history of the Web from its creation by Tim Berners-Lee to its current widespread success. The series is to examine the interactivity of the Web now such as blogging, Wikipedia, and other interactive websites, and the Web 2.0 techniques of using mashups. This is to allow people to participate in an open source way.

For myself I have found creation of content by means of Yahoo Pipes drag and drop interface for combining and sifting content very useful - http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/, and in general drag and drop programming using web interfaces is a very promising avenue.

I hope the program will make the point that Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of web browsers and the web was for it to be interactive. This means that as Web 2.0 becomes more structured with the outputs of research from the Semantic Web, such as the Web Science Initiative http://webscience.org/, it can be used for greater interactive participation, and end user programming. So with Web 3.0, the gap between the aims and achievements of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web could disappear. This would help the aims of the open source movement, as participants currently need a high level of skill to be able to participate at all, but if interactive participation and end user programming is made easier, a wider range of people can be involved in this. This would be a similar evolution to that for the widening of participation in the web in general.

The article, blog, and program examines whether the initial ‘open level playing field’ still exists -

“This is a clarion call to web users all over the globe to tell us whether they think the web is the utopia it once promised to be - a sharing, open, level playing field - or whether, as Aleks” (Aleks Krotoski) “argues, the hierarchy and inequality endemic in human society have spread to the web of today, populated by cliques and big brands.”

I can remember when I first started using the web, and was regarded as a geek (I still am one), and others perceived this barrier, where the web was regarded as unnecessary, just a hobby, and was cool amongst users but not amongst everybody else. After that there came a new prejudice that the web was for young people, and that older people wouldn’t need it and wouldn’t want to use it, now we have many ‘silver surfers’. A further hindrance was the initial bias towards more men using the web than women, which now seems to have gone. The web is more interactive than it was, and more people involved, and a wider range, but also there is much more corporate bias. So the changes have been mixed.

I think the new problem that results in a corporate bias to the web is web pages and blogs that give a collective corporate view, as agreed with the management of companies and organisations. These give no insights into the individual views and attitudes of the staff, and are often full of marketing and lack interesting content. A useful antidote to this would be for search engines to lower the priority of such web pages, and penalise them for such large amounts of marketing and advertising. A further assistance would be for companies to be prevented from dismissing staff for expressing controversial but legal views over the web.

This BBC article explains -

“Our presenter, the Guardian journalist and academic Aleks Krotoski, has just posted her first manifesto - about who holds power on the web - on our blog at bbc.co.uk/digitalrevolution.” - http://www.bbc.co.uk/digitalrevolution/.

The plans for the series are –

“The second phase of our online project will begin in September. We want to share our rushes online, as they are filmed, including our encounters with the web's head honchos.

We hope to release those under a permissive licence so that web users can re-use them or do their own mash-ups as they please. Whenever we can, we're trying to rewrite the traditional BBC script and create something truer to the spirit of the web.”

...

“So in our next phase, and working in partnership with Tim Berners-Lee's Web Science Research Initiative, we will be engaging web users in a number of online experiments that we hope will put long-held assumptions to the test.”

For instance, it is said we now write more than we read, but what percentage of web users create genuinely new content out there? We want to find out.”

Then the interactive version of the series will be online indefinitely.

Written by Peter Hale
halepv@yahoo.co.uk
http://userdrivenmodelling.blogspot.com/