The Modern Web
This is part 4 of a 7 article series that examines the technological history and theory behind the curation of human thought and discovery.
The latter half of the 20th century saw the greatest advancements in human thought curation since the development of the written word and the introduction of libraries. Advancements in computing technology and the birth of the World Wide Web put curating power in the hands of regular people and allowed the human race to record and share knowledge like never before.
But the Web was still static. There was so much potential going unused. Despite its capability to facilitate individual idea curation on a tremendous scale, the majority of its users were simply accessing the information pool and not adding to it. It was a world of readers with very few writers. Yes, there were people building simple websites with services like Geocities but most newcomers to the Web (which was most people) had neither the skills or the encouragement to help build this new online library of all human understanding. Slowly, humans became more comfortable with this new technology. Interacting in chat rooms and exchanging emails helped digitize normal social experiences that gave users a desire to collaborate even more. It was from that desire Web 2.0 would be realized.
Not quite a technical upgrade from the original Web, Web 2.0 signaled a move from a network of content consumers to one of content creators. The three major changes that accompanied this shift were blogs, wikis, and social media.
While the first word processor and printer may have only nipped at the heels of the publishing industry, weblogs (blogs) would leave them mangled and forever changed. Blogs existed as online diaries long before Web 2.0, but changes made to ease accessibility would open them up to the masses. Services like Blogger (as well as LiveJournal and WordPress) enabled normal, non-technical people, to curate their thoughts and discoveries on the Web for the world to see. Like cave painting for the modern age, writers could put their ideas onto a web page that others could visit and learn from. As the technology matured, blogs began to look less like journal entries and more like newspapers and magazines. Suddenly, you didn’t need to be a major publisher to get the word out in front of people.
The nearly complete democratization of personal publishing gave the world access to insights from anyone anywhere that had access to a computer. This would cause major disruption in the publishing industry, especially in one particular area: encyclopedias.
Prior to 2001, if you needed reference information you sought it in an encyclopedia. For almost two millennia, encyclopedias served as curated collections of general knowledge. Volumes of information carefully vetted and published as the baseline for all known human discoveries and insight.
Just as blogs challenged traditional publishing houses and legacy media, collaboratively created websites (wikis) turned the encyclopedia industry on its head. Using wiki markup language, wiki sites allowed visitors to edit the site from a web browser. Now, instead of simply viewing information on a page, you could contribute your own knowledge (on a wiki-enabled site) as well. Seeing the potential of this, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia in January of 2001.
If anything represented the ability of the Web to serve as the ultimate source of curated human thought it was Wikipedia. The site harnessed wiki capabilities to create an accessible encyclopedia, but it went farther than that. With traditional encyclopedias, the information was very general. This was mostly to do with physical space and editing constraints. An open online encyclopedia had neither of these problems. The Web could hold as much information as you could put up on it and anyone could edit mistakes when they came across one. The lack of space constraints allowed Wikipedia to curate information on nearly everything a user wanted to write about, and if it didn’t fit on Wikipedia there were specialized wikis appearing online every day. Wikipedia and the wikis that followed led an information curation revolution for the online era. Knowledge no longer had professional gatekeepers or patrons that decided what information was curated and made available to the masses. Between wikis and blogs, the vast majority of human insights were available online, but how could people find them? One answer was social media.
Collaborative web experiences have taken many forms since the early days of the net. Before Facebook there was Friendster and before that there were online forums, chat rooms, and instant messaging. Where blogs and wikis allowed for the curation of knowledge, social media served as a delivery service for bringing that content to users or users to that content. The Web was a vast library and social media acted as an army of librarians that could help you find what you were looking for or offer up a recommendation. Social media also served as a powerful facilitator of content creation. If there was a question or need the internet couldn’t solve, that cry went out across the social web until a member of the community could fill in the gap. The social networks generated online were massive in scope, but more than that, they could transfer information at lightning speeds. If you want proof, just watch how quickly a popular meme spreads across your various social sites today.
In many ways, social media acted as a clearing house for anything you could find online. Have a question? Post it to your feed, leave a message on a forum, or IM a friend and you’ll have a link to the answer before you know it. The more sophisticated social media got, the more it became a contributor to the global knowledge base and not just a curator of it. Sites like Foursquare and Amazon allowed users to share their opinions around places they’d been and products they’d purchased that helped build a database for users to scour when making a decision. Personal experiences, that would never find a place in an encyclopedia (even Wikipedia), were available on sites like Facebook or Stack Overflow for others to reference for support. Social media would prove to be the last major piece of the puzzle for Web 2.0. A system was now in place to capture the thoughts of any human capable of typing them on a keyboard and making those ideas accessible almost indefinitely for future generations.
Technological progress spanning thousands of years had finally culminated in this fantastic achievement. For those that could access the Web, the curation of human thought had been fully democratized. This unfettered environment of information sharing would create a staggering amount of new insight that even the raw human power of social media would find difficult to organize. The world’s virtual library had grown too big for people to easily remember where everything was. Just like the libraries of old, the Web needed indexing. The Web needed search.
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