This is for everyone

By T.S.

THIS week a newspaper story, supposedly published in 1991 by the Sun, a British tabloid, has been doing the rounds on the internet. Under the headline “World Wide What? Computer ‘web’ to change billions of lives (yeah, right)”, it offers a sceptical take on the invention that year of the web by Tim Berners-Lee, then a scientist at CERN, a nuclear-physics research centre near Geneva. The name of the story’s author, Dot Comme, provided a strong clue that the Sun story was not real, but that did not stop it spreading across Facebook and Twitter. In fact, the fake front page was created by the Sun as part of an educational project with the Science Museum in London that imagined how great events in the history of science and technology might have been reported by the newspaper. In reality, rather than dismissing the invention of the web in 1991, the Sun (and, indeed, everyone else) failed to notice it at all. Whether or not you took the fake story at face value, the joke is that this once-obscure invention did indeed unexpectedly change the world in countless ways.

But can the global impact of the web be measured more precisely? That is the the goal of the Web Index, launched today by the World Wide Web Foundation, a non-profit organisation established by Sir Tim in 2009 to promote universal and open access to the web. The index ranks 61 countries according to the economic, political and social impact of the web, the state of their communications and institutional infrastructure, the availability of web content and services, and the extent of web use. (Sweden comes top, followed by America and Britain.) Sir Tim talked to us about his aims in launching the Web Index, the state of the web more broadly and his appearance in the opening ceremony of the Olympic games.

What do you hope to achieve with the Web Index?

We’re trying to set the agenda. We’re trying to put web use for everybody on the international agenda, and for each country that’s wondering what it should do next, help them answer the question. In a way, there’s advice built into the way we construct the index. Layer one is, are people actually connected to the internet? Layer two is, is there content in the right languages? Layer three is, is there actually a social impact? A country can then figure out where to spend money and effort most effectively. If you are in a country where there is very little connectivity, you’ll be focusing on the bottom layer of the pyramid. If you’re in a country which has a lot of connectivity, like Iceland, then the question may be: how much stuff is there in Icelandic? How much of Wikipedia, for example, so that children can do their homework in their native language?

Which results did you find most striking?

It’s interesting when you list countries in the order of Web Index, and then list them by GDP, and you find a disparity. So for example Italy is fairly high up by GDP but not as high up for the web. And if you ask Italians, they say there’s insufficient awareness of the internet in this country. Then you take a country like Kenya, which punches above its weight. It doesn’t have much GDP to play with but is doing very well on the Web Index.

Smartphones now outsell PCs, and mobile-broadband connections are expected to overtake fixed broadband connections next year. What does it mean for the web as usage shifts from desktops to mobile devices?

It doesn't mean that everything will be done on a phone. In fact, the cost of pixels is coming down, so people will also end up getting larger and larger screens. We’ll see a large diversity of devices, and the core thing is that web technology has always been very device-independent. That device independence was important for big screens, and it will be important for mobile. It might go down to the wristwatch level. It’s a continuum.

When did you first realise the web was going to be a social medium?

It was always designed to be a social medium. Originally I wanted it to be the medium by which I could share ideas with people, so it was very much supposed to be a collaborative medium. And although it took off as a publishing medium, it hasn’t really fulfilled its potential as a collaborative medium, as far as I am concerned.

Why not?

The sorts of things I’d like to see used to be called computer-supported collaborative work, or CSCW. You would all sit at screens across the planet, and if I moved a piece, you’d move a piece, so there were collaborative editing tools. And we don’t see much of that happening. There are very few synchronous collaborative tools, most of it is asynchronous. I update something and send you a message saying “hey, reload it”. The research we’re doing at MIT and Southampton is so you can make up your own objects and say we’re going to collaborate about bridges and girders and buses, because we’re redesigning Hammersmith Bridge. My big hobby horse is information that machines understand. So if we’re collaborating over building a bridge, I want the machine to understand that it’s a bridge and be constantly checking whether it’s going to fall down or not as we change our design.

E-mail and web publishing are open and distributed, but social networks are more closed and centralised. Does that worry you?

There has always been some monopoly somewhere. It was AT&T, it was AOL, it was Netscape, it was Microsoft. I think it’s important to design new systems that work in a distributed way. We must make systems that create these social systems, or what I call “social machines”, in which people can collaborate together, but do it in a way that’s decentralised, so it’s not based on one central hub.

How do you define a social machine?

A social machine is humans doing things together, with the machinery provided by technology. Auction sites, reputation sites, peer-review sites, those are all different kinds of social machine. What I’m excited about is when we move from taking existing things like peer review and auctions, which we’ve now implemented on the web, and we invent completely new social machines.

You appeared at the opening ceremony of the Olympics and tweeted “This is for everyone”, which applies both to the web and to the Olympics. Where did the idea for that come from?

The idea for the whole session was in Danny Boyle’s mind, but the phrase was not completely defined. There would be some message sent out, and there was a certain amount of negotiation. From Danny’s point of view it was a message about giving the web away. He was trying to capture, in the few seconds he’d got, giving the web to humanity. So that was the idea. I’d type “This is for everyone” and hit return, and it would go around the screens. The idea of tweeting it, I just decided that, and asked permission to tweet it at the same time.

How did you send the tweet? Did it actually come from you, or did somebody offstage send it on your behalf?

That, I’m afraid, I must leave to the magic of theatre.