This was written for a possible book in around 1993/4. Written in Microsoft word, copied to HTML and salvaged by hand. ..Tim BL
In this chapter we look at how W3 fits in to the world and people. This is not a complete study of the social implications of the web, but in a mixture of guesswork about the future and personal belief about how the world could be, it points to some of the questions which the we, by its existence, raises about computers, information and society. It is written wih no expertese in sociology, only an observation of users and their attitudes.
Initially, the web spread as a way of disseminating information from information centers, and computing support groups. Some of the incentives which led people to grow, or not to grow, the web are mentioned in the boxes.
As a service. Providing information is part of most jobs. If the service is provided to compuer-litterate people, the web makes it easy for both provider and consumer.
To save time. Once something is on the web, it takes not extra effort to apread it around. Some people put informationon the web to save having constantly to answer the same questions on the telephone.
As a disclaimer. There is some information which, once public, releives one of a responsability. People like to make it clear what they do and do not stand for, answer for, promise or support.
To be heard. The web, like internet news, can be a soapbox. It allows people to express themselves to whoever wans to hear.
As advertisement. The web can be used subtley or (now that policy on use of the Internet has largeley relaxed) for advertising.
The process of publication, the making public of information, used to be laborious. As the typesetting and printing cost time and effort, it was natural to review what was going to be published. Material did not get published accidentally. All material was, by default, hidden from anyone apart from the industrial spy.
The web changes this, in that making information public is as easy as making it private. This allows us to review our preconceptions about information. Why should it still be private by default? We all cringe when we think or our private letters and wild plans getting into the wrong hands, but most times we have little to gain from hiding information.
There is a distinction between freedom of information and free information. By freedon of information we mean the right to publish, and the right to know. The concept ignores the cost of this communication. In practice "freely available" information -- that is, information available to anyone, may not in practice be free at all. Anyone can get a copy of any ISO International Standard -- at a price. Free information costs someone somewhere something. The fact that Internet Standards are "free" relies on many organisations contributing disk space and network links, and provides no subsidy to the working groups who create them. The big difference that the Internet and the Web have made is that the cost can be reduced to little more than it that of maintaining one's own copy of the data.
The developers of the WWW software at CERN took the stance that all information should be public by default. (Of course personal information is not public, and the project was not the subject of commercial competition, which made it easier). The result seems to have paid off, in that people from all over who were interested in the project have been able to find out how it really ticks for themselves. These people have helped spread the word about the project, and many have been able to contribute to or support it in some way. This isn't to say that we provided high quality information: just, what there was, anyone could have.
WWW was created partly with the need to help communication in very large design projects. How many times did I hear people at CERN ask, "NASA must have had these problems when building the space shuttle: I wonder what they did?". Maybe next time one will be able to have a superficial look around the project, and see what sort of problems they had.
Openness is a cultural thing. It varies from country to country, from organisation to organisation. It is learned in an atmosphere of trust, and forgotten quickly when information becomes a weapon with which to harm. Where it is, people feel good. There are fewer misunderstandings, and the wealth of available information makes a rich world for the curious.
As most of the information on the web is public, it is interesting to look at forces for and against public data. However, it is quite possible to use the web for private information, as will be discussed later.
On the other side of the coin are the reasons for keeping one's information to one's self.
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The box presents these reasons in a negative light. There are positive reasons too. One is of course are security. As computer system managers have found in the fight against network intruders, even when information is not of a confidential nature itself, someone with free access to large quantities of it can sometimes deduce dangerous information in unexpected ways. Hence "need to know"policies.
There is an argument that society is composed of a large body of law-abiding but passive people, and a small number of law-breaking and active people. The criminals have much more interest in uncovering sensitive information for their criminal (for example terrorist) aims than have the general public. The argument seems to then run that making information available will therefore create more risk from the small criminal sector than give benefit to the large law-abiding sector. Pessemistic perhaps, but a little time spent putting oneself into the criminal's place and wondering how one could exploit the new information might sometimes be worthwhile.
Attitudes to he freedom of information on the net vary widely, which is not surprising when you look at the diversity of the goals of those who pay for it to be produced. When taxpayers are paying for it, it is hard to argue that they should not have access to it. Government departments are therefore prime candidates for openness in information. One perhaps naïve point of view is that government information should be available unless specified otherwise. (..recent US acts, open government...). The web is a good test of availability. Whilst it is eminently possible to "hide" something on the web, that is, make it available in a very obscure way, the fact that computers can be used to search for new information makes it more difficult to be devious. The networking equivalent of posting a redevelopment notice on the back of a tree in the middle of a forest will be more difficult, if a program exists to search all the backs of all the trees overnight.
(Who will tell the people quotes)
There are also of course organisations committed by their mandate to publicise their findings. For them, the web comes as a relief, as it allows them to fullfil this purpose without prohibitive cost.
One of the appeals of the Internet community is the way levels its users. It is partly the equal access which each user has: as few systems are in place to reliably "authenticate" (prove the identity of) a remote user, everyone is treated alike. There is a certain anonymity of a user name, and also a history of development independent of those political structures which give status in business and academia.
The Web can bring equality in the same way, by allowing anyone access to information. It becomes less important whether the local library is well endowed, or whether one studies in an a university town: anyone with network access can in principle find the same information
However, just as the web can bring equality among the network-connected, so it can divide the network-connected from the disconnected [Depending on your vernacular, the "branchés" from the "non branchés", the "wired" from the "tired"]. Where will this division come? We can assume that terminals of some sort will be come as common as the Minitel terminal in France. In that case, those excluded will be those whose poverty or isolation precludes even a telephone, and those whose education level does not allow them to cope with using the system.
To help people cope, providers of information must ensure that their presentation is straightforward. If they do not, then we may have large parts of the web which are just as difficult to understand as are laws, or international standards, for example, today. Whilst a business will be forced to get the presentation right by the guillotine of commercial failure hanging over its head, a government department will not.
As with publishing today, there is a great market for third parties who will (for a price) present clear interpretations of obscure public documents. This third party activity goes much beyond this, and is discussed more fully in section xxxx.
(elsewhere-- under comercial developments?)
The first commercial interest in the Web was from companies interested in making money from selling software, hardware and services to web users. The second, and more significant, interest is from companies interested in making money by selling information itself.
While these are both important, a yet more interesting exconomic impact is of the of the business which is eased, and opened up, by the web as a form of communication. The conventional information industry will only be one sector to benefit from the web, and eventually a relatively small sector. There are many businesses, from travel agents and banking to dating services, which one might not think of as information industry, but which can be mostly carried out using information. Other businesses involving materials and people still benefit from the existsence of the web.
Whatever one's field, it is easy to regard it as central to the operation of business, and information is no exception, as much of marketting, buying, selling, hirng and planning involves principally the collection, analysis and redistribution of information.
Common worries: Drinking from a fire hose, inability to determine reliability of sources, etc. Finding things. Misuse of log information and privacy.
This is one expression of the fear of the abundance of data on the web. However, as we have seen, the information does not pour out at one, it just sits there waiting to be read. The analogy of "stemming the flood" does not really apply. The problem is most often that information is either not there, or if there it has not been put (linked to) the place you would have expected it to be. The secondary result of this is that one spends one's time reading all sorts of garbage just in the hope of finding what one is looking for. This is when the real frustration comes in. In fact, at the moment, the web is very sparse. It contains great details in certain areas, and then in other areas it contains nothing at all. If one jumps into it with a specific real problem -- to find a discussion group on the work of E.M.Forster, or a map of the battle of Hastings, or even the London Underground, the chances are quite slim that it is there at all. And there is never a way to be absolutely sure that it is not.
This is a real problem. The solutions we have to date involve real effort by real people in making a clear useful web. The web does not do this automatically. We hope, though, that it will allow human beings to do it much more efficiently.
One effect of the arrival of laser printers was that anyone with a personal computer could make a memo, a newsletter or a book which looked just as smart as the "real thing". Idle thoughts and which notes which were once dashed off on a torn-off page of spiral bound note paper could be sent around instantly with the look and feel of a formal government announcement. This removed some information: the information carried in the feel of the paper, the amount of care taken in the typesetting, or the carelessness of the handwriting. This was important information about the status of the document. Nowadays my desk is heaped with identical white sheet and I actually have to read them to decide how serious they are, and even then it sometimes it isn't clear.
Electronic messages and documents have the same problem. Usenet news articles have used various conventions to help. The smiley faces on their sides made up out of punctuation are attempts to replace the facial expression which one misses in electronic mail messages.
:-) :-( ;-) :-} :-(( 8^)
Fig. Smileys representing a smile, a frown, a wink, a wry smile, a deep frown, and a frown wearing spectacles. Tilt your head to the left to see them.
You might notice in electronic mail messages other ways of presenting the status of messages: when i want to be informal i sometimes use lower case i's and sign myself with just a "t". When I want to be more formal I might fully justify the text and even check the spelling.
When you come across a document on the web it is difficult to know its source and status. Perhaps we should introduce icons, or background colors, for documents to deliberately convey status sich a notes, drafts, official documents.
[Anecdote icon] J Recently CERN received a request for a server to be put into the list of servers under the name of a large university. We complied, noting that the server had, as advertised, all sorts of useful info
@@Recently CERN received a request for a server to be put into the list of servers under the name of a large university. We complied, noting that the server had, as advertised, all sorts of useful information about the university and the neighborhood. Pretty soon we received a request to register another server for the same university, "and please put this one in the list above the other one". An attempt to clear this up led to a heated exchange of mail rising to a fairly exantled level in the university. One party of whom felt they had a far superior server, while the other maintained that their server was officially mandated by the university. We solved the problem in the end with separate pointers to the "University" and "University Underground" servers and honor was satisfied. This underlines the necessity to make it quite clear who speaks for and has authorised information.
Hopefully, a system of "approval" links described above will allow a general solution to this problem, while leaving a suitable way of representing this to the user up to the human interface specialists.