quotEnsemble#18—The Internet, the Web and Human cacophony
“Storytelling on the web is like wrangling wild beasts and piranhas in the middle of a sandstorm with screaming gypsies at your back. ”
Jonathan Harris in Wired - the sum of all emotions…
ᔥ wired uk
“The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you’re willing to risk the consequences. ”
Paul Graham in “Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age”
“… We can rule certain images out right at the start. We know, contra former Sen. Ted Stevens, that the Internet is not a ‘series of tubes.’ We know that ‘the Wild West’ doesn’t fit, not for a landscape that’s been so nicely parceled, policed and manicured. We also know that it’s not that other ’90s favorite, an ‘information superhighway’— the point of a highway is to get somewhere, after all, somewhere that is not a highway, while the point of the Internet is to stay there, forever and ever, like a hot tub. A hot tub, after all, is shared with friends and strangers, whose warm water swirls around you, lulling you into complacency while silently transmitting disease. Yes: The Internet is definitely more like a hot tub than a highway.”
Christine Smallwood in “What Does the Internet Look Like?”
this essay originally appeared in The Baffler, Vol. 2 issue 1
“Perhaps I should explain where I’m coming from. I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out. I would like it to bring our friends and colleagues closer, in that by working on this knowledge together we can come to better understandings.
If misunderstandings are the cause of many of the world’s woes, then can we not work them out in cyberspace. And, having worked them out, we leave for those who follow a trail of our reasoning and assumptions for them to adopt, or correct.”
Tim Berners-Lee in Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny (1995)