Anniversaries are wonderful things. They help us reflect on our past, present, and future. Anniversaries can be complicated though. (My spouse and I have three of them, but that’s another story!) While Internet denizens celebrate the web’s “official” 25^th anniversary today, we might pause to recognize how confusing and uncertain “inventions” and “births” sometimes are: is this about sowing an idea, convincing a boss of the idea’s viability, coding a computer program, connecting a web server, uploading the first webpage, logging in users, clicking links? Meanwhile, in the midst of spying, surveillance, and privacy concerns, we might remind ourselves that the web, from the beginning, has been a technology of connections. So what to make of the past 25 years?

Today’s “Happy 25^th, Web” (the Web At 25) actually celebrates the publication of a document by the web’s primary inventor, Tim Berners-Lee: “Information Management: A Proposal.” Deemed “vague but exciting,” it proposed a solution to the problem of keeping track of all those little pieces that make up large projects at research institutions like CERN, the Swiss physics lab where Berners-Lee worked in the 1980s. The big idea of that proposal, and hence what we are really celebrating today, is global hypertext, nonlinear “linked information systems.” Bringing hypertext to the internet would create a single unified information space in which any document or piece of data, regardless of where or on which internet-connected machine it was located, could be instantly reached with a single mouse click.

Personally, I really do think the proposal (although initially rejected!) was a great idea and is worthy of celebration. The problem  (besides all the other major problems about encryption, privacy, surveillance, etc.) is that the popular birthday narrative leaves out a lot of other things that didn’t make much sense at the time. In his book, Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee describes how hard it was to try to explain this vision to others between 1989-93: “People had to be able to grasp the Web in full, which meant imagining a whole world populated with Websites and browsers. They had to sense the abstract information space that the Web could bring into being. It was a lot to ask.” It WAS a lot to ask. I will admit, as a big internet fan these days, that I totally did not get it at first. (At first!) And I actually think this is an important and historically relevant thing to admit.

To consider what using the Internet was like without the web, check out Brendan Kehoe’s demo (Nov 1993) on the Computer Chronicles (skip to 09:08); we see Gopher, Finger, Telnet, and using Telnet to contact Compact Disc Connection (unfortunately, the system hangs before completing purchase of the Mariah Carey CD). There is no mention of the web, nearly five years after it’s “birth.” How could this even be? Teleological accounts of history assume a kind of forward march, where the past is rewritten in ways that make sense to contemporary minds.

The W3C Team is urging web users to share their “earliest memories” today, and in that spirit, I wanted to share just how hard it was for me (and I wasn’t alone!) to wrap my head around the Internet, let alone the web, when I first tried to connect in the fall of 1995. It was confusing trying to figure this stuff out with my fellow housemates and no tech wizard friends for aid!

Looking forward to investigating this “internet” thing I was hearing about, I bought my first computer at the start of my senior year of college in 1995. Alas, my college tech store didn’t realize I wanted to use the machine to go online, and so the computer had to be returned to IT and taught to speak internet. It was elaborate:

InterSLIP and InterPPP were installed, my computer had to learn TCP/IP, modem ports were configured, many a floppy disk was run. After all was said and done, I used my 14.4k baud modem (think slow, noisy) to at last see the World Wide Web world. It looked like this:

It was probably a few weeks before I realized that “eWorld” wasn’t “World Wide Web.” This was Apple’s (soon to fail) commercial online service, eWorld. When I introduce today’s college students, who no longer make distinctions between the internet, web or various platforms and apps—all is just “online”—to web history, I usually ask them to tell me how they would get to the internet. We take a tour through the town and discuss metaphors, space, each building, all of which were filled with forums, resources, chatrooms available to and for other eWorld users. Wasn’t I “online”? Wasn’t this the eWorld Wide Web? Well, yes and no. I was connected to other paid subscribers of Apple’s commercial online service. This was not the web, I finally realized. (A devoted fan has recreated the eWorld experience online! However, note that this simulation runs MUCH faster than the experience I remember.)

One day, my housemate clicked that tiny little statue holding the globe in the middle of the town, and we found our way out of eWorld and into a much bigger one, a World Wide Web. Once connected to the web, we moved around by gliding across “handwoven” hyperlinks, endless HotLists of Cool Sites. (These lists were filled with the “quality” sites of 1994: the Hawaii dinosaur museum! The Vatican! The Louvre before it was renamed and taken down because it wasn’t actually owned by the Louvre!) One could not count on search engines to lead you to the “best of it,” the useful, interesting, fun stuff—the “cool” sites of the day. You had to rely on the scattered lists of pointers made by other users.

While I am reluctant to embrace a single “anniversary” of the World Wide Web, I do believe that something special was taking shape when Berners-Lee was working out that proposal 25 years ago. It was the beginning framework for a shared (technical and imagined) information space that brought hypertext to the internet.  These components—a collective imagination forged through global hypertext—were what I thought of as “the heart” of the web (once I figured out what that was!).

Today, to me, these characteristics seem considerably more elusive. As I shuffle through apps on my iPad, I’m often struck by the similarities with the pre-web internet that Kehoe demonstrated as he moved from gopher to telnet to finger and back in 1993. And likewise, as I click on links to web content shared through Facebook, I can’t help but note how hard the links work to keep me cloistered, safe within Facebook’s own little eWorld. Some of these experiences are (ruefully, to me) mandated by the affordances of these platforms. But others, it seems, are a combination of social protocols and habit, the ways we choose or refuse to link and weave our own personal narratives across our web histories and timelines. We must not let linking become a synonym for tagging or hashtags! These are very different technologies of connection. On this “anniversary,” I would just like to urge all of us to not give up on hypertext, to continue to seek new ways to make that kind of connection meaningful.

1. This time around, the video game anniversary of note is the Playstation, which has turned 15, and Joystiq celebrates with gifts of not just one but two infographics. This also makes it a good time to ask if classic video games still hold up. We’ll see if Madden on Facebook will hold up. I’m 100% certain The Room Tribute Flash game will; how could it not?

2. The music industry continues to struggle with sales, and while on iTunes music is still central, apps downloads may soon surpass song downloads (though The Oatmeal has a great cartoon about how we really feel when buying apps), and music labels aren’t cooperating with Ping but are cooperating with Google. Maybe Iron Maiden has the solution to the music industry’s problems.

3. Paste Magazine was among the print casualties this fortnight, and Arthur Sulzberger announced the New York Times would be one someday. Right now, newspapers are struggling to maintain their advertising share, and Gawker is beating all newspapers but the New York Times in online hits share, while Vogue is working to make both its print and online sources more advertiser friendly, and Playboy has become more blind-reader friendly.

4. It’s Hollywood summer summary time: summer was slow, attendance was down, ticket price gouging was up, there were summer trends and summer winners and losers, but Kick-Ass wasn’t the loser many first thought.

5. In indie cinema, it’s been a good year for documentaries and a good summer for women in art house seats and behind cameras, but it’s been a tough summer for specialty crossover hits and a tough everything for Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote project. What it’ll be for I’m Still Here is being hotly debated.

6. Redbox hit its one billionth DVD rental, and now it’s looking to a new horizon: streaming. Google wants to compete in that realm too, one that has helped to make Netflix’s CEO a very rich man. Blockbuster actually has an advantage over the others in being able to offering certain rentals earlier, but it might not have the money to market that fact to consumers. iTunes and video-on-demand consumers can see Freakonomics earlier than even theatergoers can, and David Ehrlich believess such a model can actually help theaters in the end.

7. Twitter now touts 145 million registered users worldwide, but still has yet to truly go mainstream. It’s increasingly a key news platform, however (the Ford Explorer verdict story is especially striking), as well as a music industry factor, and for its alchemy with Werner Herzog and Kanye West (or so we presume) alone, we have to be grateful it exists.

8. Jaron Lanier doesn’t like social media forms; Pepsi loves them. Jim Louderback doesn’t like viral videos; Arcade Fire loves them. Nicholas Carr doesn’t like hyperlinks; Scott Rosenberg loves them.

9. The new Digg got criticized by old users and pwned by Reddit users, part of a larger trajectory of decline for Digg, which has responded to its latest problems by firing an engineer and asking users to chill out, while Reddit has responded by preparing for expansion. No matter who claims supremacy, it’s tougher than you might think to measure online traffic. YouTube Instant certainly got a lot of traffic, so much that YouTube’s CEO offered its undergrad student creator a job. Maybe he could help YouTube finally turn a profit.

10. Some good News for TV Majors links from the past two weeks: Bordwell Says Don’t Bother, Univision Wins 18-49, Please Don’t Call It a Recap, State of Network News, Ramadan TV, Too Much TV?, Smaller Channel Squeeze, Comcast Charity, Done Deal, Apple & Amazon News, TV the New Cinema?, Emmy Coverage.



1. James Poniewozik describes the literary and political joys of satirical Twitter accounts, such as @BPGlobalPR, whose anonymous editor has brilliantly skewered corporate-speak. Such must-reads have helped Twitter as a company, which in the past six months has doubled its staff and its collection of cool office doodads. It’s also growing fast as a video source, though it has irked some by banishing third-party ad networks. Finally, HubSpot has just about every Twitter infographic you could ever want or even imagine.

2. Things were much calmer for Facebook this fortnight as CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a few privacy changes (and placated Pakistan), but Pete Cashmore says the privacy war is far from over. The Quit Facebook Day didn’t see too many quit Facebook, but Tom Spring says it’s the negative PR that really mattered, not the quitting. Facebook is still comfortably atop Google’s list of most-visited sites and is still the most popular i-Phone app, but Collin Douma gives us a glimpse at the next Facebook freakout coming: the prospect of Facebook charging for use.

3. Good news/bad news for Apple: The Department of Justice is investigating the anti-competitive practices of iTunes and possibly more, but Apple finally toppled Microsoft for the title of most valuable technology company. Cutting it down the middle, Reid Rosefelt says CEO Steve Jobs is just like Kim Jong-il but in a sort of good way. Plus, Jobs says he’s got the answer for saving the media business; I’m betting Kim Jong-il doesn’t. I also bet Kim never inspired the creation of a dating site.

4. Nicholas Carr says we need to stop dropping hyperlinks into sentences (um…darn), but Scott Berkun proposes a few counter-arguments (yay!). Speaking of links, it’s looking like Digg is dying. And as far as the blogosphere, Frederic Lardinois offers a few infographics detailing the demographics of bloggers; nearly 30% reside in the U.S., and the gender split is even. And as far as other stories related to the internet that I wanted to fit in somewhere, Sarah Lacey reports on how a Southeast Asian newspaper is dealing with the digital revolution, Ryan Chittum describes how the online paywall helps out the print Irish Times, and Pepsi says they plan to turn much more to social media marketing than traditional methods of advertising.

5. One study says that 4% of video gamers qualify as extreme, which means they play upwards of 50 hours a week; the average is 13 hours. I personally spent a good chunk of time playing Google.com’s Pac-Man game last week, but despite the claim that office productivity declined measurably thanks to the game, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry says that without it, we still would have been wasting our time some other way. Maybe we can waste it in better ways: J. Matthew Zoss interviews a pair of game designers about how to build satisfying gameplay around moral issues.

6. A survey indicates that 33% of musicians don’t have health insurance; Nancy Pelosi says health care reform will help. I assume Lady Gaga has the money for good coverage; she said she doesn’t even mind if fans illegally download her music because she makes plenty enough from touring. I bet she’d be bothered if a politician appropriated “Bad Romance” though (insert Mark Souder joke here), and numerous politicians have recently been taken to task, or even court, for using music in their campaigns without proper permission or licensing.

7. A lot of negative Hollywood news: AMC has closed the U.S.’s first-ever megaplex (though some might see that as a positive); theater ticket prices are soaring; May’s tentpoles sunk (and stunk), and Memorial Day weekend was a box office bust (Prince of Persia disappointed, proof for David Cox that video game movies never work); the Weinsteins’ bid for Miramax fell through; producers everywhere are reeling; Guillermo del Toro has quit The Hobbit; the summer films are overwhelming white already, but many freaked out at the suggestion of Donald Glover as Spiderman; and Brett Ratner is throwing around words like “edgy” in connection with his planned Snow White movie. The one bright spot you can always find in Hollywood? Pixar.

8. Brian Brooks highlights the must-see Cannes entries, and Eugene Hernandez recaps the business side of Cannes. The Village Voice assesses the post-Miramax crop of indie distributors, and the LA Times focuses in on Focus Features, one of the few remaining specialty distributors owned by a major. Chris Thilk says high-end indies are getting a lot of play this summer, while John Bradburn calls for grassroots “film gigging,” akin to low-fi, DIY music touring.

9. On the business side of DVD, Nielsen assesses the current impact of DVD rental kiosks, while Netflix sees DVD-by-mail peaking in 2013, expecting that streaming will take over thereafter. On the cinephilia side of DVD, Jonathan Rosenbaum considers DVD’s impact on the collective viewing experience, while Paul Synder wonders how streaming might affect such viewing and accessibility issues.

10. The best News for TV Majors links of the fortnight: Season Summaries, Lost Engagement, Buzz vs. Ratings, Upcoming Retrans Fights, Survivor Contracts, CNN Revenue, The TV Times, Emmy Nomination Eligibility Lists, Showrunner Panel, Zucker’s Exit Deal.