What is it that makes the web so amazing?

‘Fess up: who remembers a time when there was no internet?

Once upon a time, if a child, student, writer or reader wanted to know something, they would have to march off to the library* – a day’s hike to the great metropolis on the horizon, for some – and physically track down obscure and tangled information that lay hidden between pages, at the back of shelves and relied primarily on one’s ability to navigate the Dewey decimal card catalogue and microfiche machines. It was often laborious, sometimes frustrating and could result in getting lost for days in the wrong terrain.

What is it that makes the web – a living library – so amazing? First and foremost, the answer would have to be information, and an almost universal access to that information. Traditional libraries also offer this, but the beauty of the internet is the ability to link to a resource, and immediately see it, providing the reader with a knowledge architecture that the singular text from the library can never have.

The book – even if accompanied by a generous list of additional reading material – is static. It is bound to its form as flat, unchanging text on a page that leads nowhere but to the following page. The internet offers the capacity to connect data – that is, make data meaningful.

For instance, say one reads a Wikipedia article on writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which contains copious internal links, 56 footnotes (many linked) and eight external links, as well as category links at the bottom of the page. All of these links make researching Charlotte Perkins Gilman a different reading experience to reading a printed biography. Reading this Wikipedia entry is no longer a purely linear reading experience. (Though a recent study found that generally individuals do not read scholarly material in a linear way).

It is, rather, an opportunity to read all of the associated reading material for this (collaborative) article. The reader is more active in the reading process, and less reliant on the opinion of a sole author, because the option is there for the reader to navigate the sea of meaningful data connected to the aforementioned article.

The corollary of this relationship means that when a web author links to other information and data, they are providing data maps that tell machines that there is a connection between the data, plus what the connection or relationship between the strands of information actually is.

Tim Berners-Lee, ‘inventor’ of the world wide web, expands on these theories in his 2009 TEDtalk:

What does this mean for the future of newspapers, columnists and writers who haven’t adapted to the medium? This is a critical question: why is it we still live in a world of unsourced journalism, opinion pieces and blogs, of writing on the web that does not embrace links, as if the article being read contained the only meaningful data on the subject in the entire world wide web? Surely we have reached the period where, as Julian Assange recently suggested at a talk in Melbourne, journalists should be able to give their source material and raw data so readers can independently interrogate that material.

It’s time readers were privy to Andrew Bolt’s research and stats; let readers see for themselves the sources of the Virginia Hausseggers, as well as the crucial context within which statements are made.

The next step in the wonders of the web world is one where writers no longer simply link; they provide the quality of the relationship.

It is stupefying to pause and consider the sheer volume of content, research, publications and collaborations on the internet. There is still much room to get lost in the wrong terrain, but it is also less consuming to extricate oneself and discover a new terrain.

The web is filled with amazingness. But the most amazing quality is the linking of meaningful data: hyperlinks building relationships between the pages of the web, like a technological join-the-dots, with each link and page growing the whole.

*Not that that was meant as a disparaging remark about libraries. Meanland loves libraries.