Thirty years ago today, on August 6, 1991, a computer scientist at CERN presented a project he’d worked on for months. Tim Berners-Lee described his work as combining “the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.” The name he gave this was “World Wide Web.”
The web has changed a lot over the past thirty years, some for better and some for worse. As I think back to my early days on the web in the 1990s and 2000s, there was a lot about the web that seemed exciting and full of potential and creativity. The web had no technical or physical limits, it was device-agnostic, it was unpredictable, it was non-linear, it was flexible, it was a playground. It was open.
In those early years the web was full of experimentation and exploration – not only among indie developers or kids, like me, just playing around with HTML and CSS and seeing what we could make, but companies that would furiously grow and disappear just a few years later. And over the next thirty years, a lot has changed. Flash came and went. The spacer GIF is no longer necessary. You don’t need AOL’s CDs anymore. Tables aren’t so ugly. The rise of the blogosphere and social media. The emergence of digital history.
All of this made the web what it is today – the formative years of a new medium, still searching for standards and technologies and full of creative expression. I worry that the web of today, heavily centralized behind Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, has made the web a worse place. Of course, cyberbullying and misinformation are not new features of our social media age – such things were likewise rampant on IRC chatrooms and online forums. But the concentration of user-generated content into the hands of just a few companies has exacerbated these problems. The web is less open.
I’m a historian of technology and I work as a web developer at a place I think of as an indie web shop creating really important and engaging digital history, and even so: I have no idea what the web will look like in the next thirty years. But I do know we can’t leave the future of the web to Big Tech. If we want a web that’s more inclusive, takes accessibility seriously, cares about performance, security, usability, decentralization, openness – that’s on us. Let’s shape the web together.
