COM 150 students, MIT, Brits study wired world

Shades of Philo Farnsworth, who invented television and wouldn't let his children watch it?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a key early developer of the World Wide Web, has called for a Web Science Research Initiative that, according to a BBC News report, "will chart out a research agenda aimed at understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web."

A joint project of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in England, the Science Research Iniative will be cross-disciplinary. Berners-Lee said it is needed because uncontrolled growth of the internet is "a social as well as technological phenomenon." And it's one that worries him. He told a BBC reporter he "is worried about the way it could be used to spread misinformation and 'undemocratic forces.'" The story continues:

The web has transformed the way many people work, play and do business.

But Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he feared that, if the way the internet is used is left to develop unchecked, "bad things" could happen.

He wants to set up a web science research project to study the social implications of the web's development.

The changes experienced to date because of the web are just the start of a more radical transformation of society, he said.

But Sir Tim is concerned about the way it could end up being used.

He told the BBC: "If we don't have the ability to understand the web as it's now emerging, we will end up with things that are very bad.

"Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web.

"Studying these forces and the way they're affected by the underlying technology is one of the things that we think is really important," he said.

While the news media, including the on-line media, have been more interested in things like sex scandals and congressional elections, Berners-Lee's concerns and the MIT-Southampton study group are probably more important than either.

In its Nov. 3 story on MIT's announcement of the group's formation, The Boston Globe gave some of the backstory:

Berners-Lee invented the Web in 1989 as an easy way to share vast amounts of scientific information. He developed HTML, the simple language used to create basic Web pages. But Berners-Lee was as surprised as anyone by the rapid public embrace of the Web. "We really just created the underlying rules," he said, "and then it created itself from a mass of humanity."

As a result, scientists don't have a complete understanding of how the millions of computers now on the Web interact . The institute wants to recruit mathematicians and computer scientists, but also psychologists and other social scientists, to develop models of how information is stored on the Web.

"We need people who understand the social and the technical aspects," said Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton. This will help them devise better ways to search for data, share it, and secure it against unauthorized access.

And a news report by on the magazine Scientific American's website gives more of the backstory:

In one decade the World Wide Web has exploded into 14 billion pages that touch almost all aspects of modern life. The network has grown in a grassroots way, based on a handful of pervasive protocols and aloof guidance from the World Wide Web Consortium, a forum based at M.I.T. for Web developers. Essentially, millions of devotees have spent countless hours advancing the Web bit by bit. Although forceful, the effort has also been piecemeal and inefficient.

Furthermore, vast emergent properties are beginning to arise on the Web, and no one is studying how they have blossomed or what they may mean for society. E-mail led to instant messaging, which grew into social networks such as MySpace. The transfer of documents led to file sharing sites such as Napster, which led to user-generated portals like YouTube. Tagging documents with identifying labels is prompting the emergence of a Semantic Web, a global effort to allow computers to recognize not just what online documents are, but what kinds of information they contain and what it might mean. The Semantic Web promises to bring all sorts of useful data to users, not just text and imagery.

In fact the Semantic Web, whatever it may be, is one of Berners-Lee's main concerns at the moment.

Among the few U.S. newspapers outside of Boston (where MIT is a local story) that ran a story was The San Francisco Chronicle, which does a creditable job of keeping up with developments in nearby Silicon Valley. A story headed "What are Web's Societal, Scientific Consequences? Academics Begin Studying Impact of Having a Wired Planet" by staff writer Tom Abate quoted several Silicon Valley types on the implications. They're huge. They extend from marketing techniques to freedom of speech and techolology in the People's Republic of China.

Communications 150 students: Read the stories, especially the ones in the Chronicle and Scientific American. Go to the Google News directory. Do a keyword search on Tim Berners-Lee, MIT and web. Decide for yourselves what's going on with the web. How imporant is it? What does it mean for the future? For your future? For your career?

Here's a half-serious footnote on what it means to be wired. It's about coffee, but it's also about how people in authority all too often respond to change. Is it also about the free flow of information?

In a commentary published in The Guardian (U.K.), Calestous Juma, the director of the Science, Technology and Globalisation project at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government, suggested Berners-Lee was right. Juma said, "What is critical is not simply worrying about spread of 'bad things', but finding a healthy balance between the benefits and risks of the web." He finds wisdom in the history of how coffee came to be accepted, first in the Middle East and then in Europe.

Coffee?

Yes. Coffee. And coffeehouses. The problem wasn't so much the coffee, in fact, as it was where people drank it and what they said to each other while they were drinking it. It began in Arabia, says Juma:

In 1511 a viceroy and inspector of markets in Mecca, Khair Beg, outlawed coffee consumption and coffeehouses. He relied on Persian expatriate doctors and local jurists who argued that coffee had the same impact on human health as wine.

But the real reasons lay in part in the role of coffeehouses in undermining his authority and offering alternative sources of information on social affairs in his realm. His masters in Cairo, however, were not amused. They castigated the scientific basis of the claim and ruled that nobody would be denied access to heaven because he drunk coffee.

Europeans were no more receptive. In England, Juma suggests, there may have been an economic conflict of interest, too:

In 1675 England's King Charles II issued a declaration "for the suppression of coffeehouses", charging that coffeehouses were the source of malicious and scandalous statements aimed at defaming the king and undermining public order. He directed that coffeehouses be shut down. His appeal to national security was partly a cover to protect tea interests.

In time, cooler heads prevailed in England, too. Good thing, too. How could books, articles and, yes, student papers, get written without coffee?

Without the internet, for that matter?