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 … The dream is that if everybody works from day to day using the Web as their notebook, mailer and calendar … then the scaling problems of teams and organizations could somehow be solved. This is a dream.
Predictor: Berners-Lee, Tim
Prediction, in context:The following is an excerpt from a 1995 speech given by Tim Berners-Lee at MIT, arranged by Andy Van Dam in honor of the 50th anniversary of Vannevar Bush’s visionary article “As We May Think” in the Atlantic monthly in 1945. In this excerpt Berners-Lee discusses his dreams for the Web: ”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. The initial Web work was driven largely by my working on projects with people in remote sites. These people had great enthusiasm but little time or travel budget. (Also, as a technologists, we would all want to focus on the technical problems, leaving human interaction to the strictly necessary.) The dream is that if everybody works from day to day using the Web as their notebook, mailer and calendar, (just as Englebart’s NLS/Augment system allowed one to, for example) then the scaling problems of teams and organizations could somehow be solved. This is a dream.”
Biography:Tim Berners-Lee of CERN first released his revolutionary World-Wide Web for initial use in 1991 and with it shared his invention HTML (hypertext mark-up language). He later served as director of W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations whose goal was to find ways to help the Web reach its full potential. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: October 12, 1995
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: W3.org
Title, headline, chapter name: Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Talk.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Bruno, Marian Theresa