A History of Communication

Speech, Writing, Print, Telephony, Web. How technology is catching up with the brain.

A Brief History of the Web

The Web is now so ingrained in our lives that it is easy to forget that it is less than twenty years old. But the History of Web goes back much further, to the pioneering technologists who built the first hypertext systems and the men and women before them who imagined great libraries of interconnected information that would augment human intellect and drive civilization forward. In this lecture we will explore the pre-digital origins of the Web, look at how it developed into the mass communication system we have today, and speculate on the next stages of its evolution in the context of Web Science and Social Media.

How The Web Devalues Creativity

By lowering the barriers to communication, the Web has not made it possible for writers to make more money; instead large corporate aggregators are taking advantage of creators to make themselves rich. MaryAnn Johanson is the creator of one of the oldest independent film review sites on the web (flickfilosopher.com). In this lecture she addresses the problems of the long tail for the long tailees. How can a creative professional make a living through the Web, when all the power is held by the aggregators? So much for radical disintermediation... This share contains the lecture slides (see slide #29-30 for the summary of her argument), the lecture audio, further reading, a link to her web site and a critique of The Longer Tail from students at another Web Science Trust Network lab.