“All kinds of disciplines are going to have to converge. People with all kinds of skills are going to have to work together to build a new web which is going to be even better,” he said.
He also said employers were now beginning to complain that there were not enough people who fully understood the web.
“There aren’t any courses at the moment and it hasn’t really been brought together.
“We’re hearing complaints from companies when they need people that really understand the medium from both the technological and social side.
“When you look at university courses, web science isn’t there – it seems to fall through the cracks.
“So we’d like to put it on the curriculum so that there are a lot more people who understand this.” —Web inventor fears for the future (BBC)
This term, I’m teaching a 200-level “Writing for the Internet” course and a 400-level “New Media Projects” course, which are in some ways the freakiest English courses I’ve ever taught, since I find myself talking about ethics one minute and Euclidean geometry the next.
The sociological and the technological are inseparable in such an environment.
“Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web.”
You can put ruthless dictators in a car or a hospital, but they will still be dictators. The environment, while having a significant impact on personality, doesn’t always change a person. Change is always contingent on the individual.
That being said, the Web is not any more revolutionary than the TV, the printing press or even language itself. While much hesitation was occuring during these transitions, there was eventaully balance.
The problem has remained consistent: people have drawn on the faculties of the media of their time and used the weaknesses as strengths. This is nothing new and no new issues will emerge either. Quite frankly, people that design media can plan all they want, but a medium is art. You can never anticipate everything, no matter how much planning is involved.
We’re only human, right? And we certainly can’t predict the future. This statement relies on the fundamental assumption that we have the foresight to completely know all the possible affects and anticipate how to deal with them in the design of the medium.
I’m not copping out, but I do feel that this is ambitious. This may surprise you, seeing that I fit the profile for this type of understanding. Let me tell you, though it’s the hardest damn thing to do! Media and communication studies can evolve and so can computer science, but creating a new category is just insanity.
This is certainly not as big of a deal as the language suggests. As I hinted on earlier, a new medium is created (science), someone theorizes the parameters of the medium (media theorist), and someone breaks all the parameters (communicator). I get a sense that Berners-Lee wants to break this cycle by designing and developing this medium, but I say that you cannot completely control everything and you especially cannot anticipate that your design will work the right way.
In essence, the better solution would be to evolve the communication field with further emphasis on ethics and to explore how to give more positive incentive and motivation to keep these standards. If it is not profitable for people to over-manipulate the audience, spam, post propoganda, etc, then no one would do it.
*Gets on the soap box*
In a consumerist society, it is extremely profitable to spam and send viruses, intruders, spyware, trojans and adware.
*Steps off the soap box*
Even if you do design a “better” medium (Web 3.0?), people will always find holes and use your design against you. It’s been done with print, it’s been done with TV, and probably even with word-of-mouth. This is not relevant for media theorists, nor media makers, this is a job for advocacy, and ethics education.
The cop-out would be to only change the environment because a person is behaving badly. While I agree there needs to be progression in this domain, I feel you need attention to both domains.
I chose to interpret his statements as a call for a broader understanding of the web as a social rather than purely technological phenomenon. It was not too long ago that computer scientists were assumed to be the experts on the web, which is a bit like treating an electrical engineer as an expert in programming or a chemist as an expert in psychology.
English has historically been the discipline that has permitted this kind of inquiry into new things. The past few years at the 4Cs there has been an almost tangible excitement about what our students stand to gain when we consider the internet as a space for composition and communication and creation, rather than a conduit for the transmission of data.
In the article you link to, Berners-Lee says, “Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web.” What the heck is he talking about? Mind control? Propoganda? These are nothing new in the realm of communication. Do we really need a school of ‘web science’ as a corrective to this problem or is he just looking for funding for this new, albeit nice-sounding, foundation? Because it seems to me what is needed is simply basic information literacy and critical thinking. The sort of thing we teach in the discipline of English.