Happy 30th Birthday, World Wide Web! (What's Next?)

Thirty years ago - on March 12, 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a way to use the (then in its infancy) internet to more easily share information via something called "hyper-text."

Berners-Lee's proposal - with comments from supervisor: "Vague, but exciting."

The world wide web was born, and things would never be the same. Anyone younger than 30 has never known a world with out the World Wide Web, and would probably find it hard to conceive of such an existence. In fact, the World Wide Web is, for many "users," taken for granted, accepted as a fact of life, a default reality. But passive acceptance of the Web, and uncritical consumption of its content poses some really big problems.

I encourage my Digital Communications students to THINK about their work as digital communicators from different perspectives, and to sometimes step back and look at the big picture. One way to do this is to read this short piece by Berners-Lee called "30 years on, What's Next for the Web?" Read, reflect, respond, and THINK.

Sir Tim Berners Lee arriving at the Guildhall to receive
the Honorary Freedom of the City of London
(Photo by Paul Clark - CC 4.0)

Agency in the Smartphone Museum

What makes "New Media" new? (Hint - it's not just technology.)

There are two areas where new media can claim be new:

1. Access - while older (pre-internet) improvements continually improved access to writing, music, photos, etc., these changes were incremental. The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web brought about readical changes in access to knowledge and art.
2. Agency - Older technologies also incrementally moved toward providing agency of creation to the "people," but the advent of the Web and connected devices has had a revolutionary democratizing effect of granting creative agency (artistic, authorial, etc.) to the masses. 

Recently, the Smartphone Museum exhibited an installation called "Agency in New Media" at Limestone College. You can see samples from the museum exhibit here:
http://bit.ly/AgencyNewMedia