For centuries, the words “net” and “web” had involved the idea of capture. All this has changed in the Age of Information.
In 1969 man landed on the moon and computer scientists sent the first message over what we now call the net. The word was meant to be “LOGIN”, the system crashed after two letters, and the first message was “LO”.
While development of an “internetwork” continued apace, the earliest use of the word “internet” in this context that I have found is the 1974 paper “Specification of internet transmission control program” by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine. Incidentally, they acknowledge the contribution of Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist who had already sent the first email in 1971 and who introduced the ubiquitous “@”.
The net as we know it is a means by which computers share. The next question is, share what? The aforementioned email is an example but half a century on ubiquity itself has become the web, that strange place where information itself is both static and mobile.
Tim Berners-Lee holds the credit for founding the web as we know it. One well-known document is a proposal authored in March 1989 and updated in May 1990 where he refers to a “Mesh” and “discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system.”
For the social historian, an interesting document is the formal proposal by Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau to CERN management headed “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project”. It is, on its face, a fascinating example of standing on the shoulders of giants, on the one hand recognizing what has been achieved and on the other proposing what next great step can be taken. By the bye, it is a rare example of defining and using terms which have become standard and, largely, unchanged in meaning.
The memo, like a ubiquity of memos since, is in email form, “from”, “to” and “cc’d”, and dated 12 November 1990.
It recognises the pre-existence of hypertext, calling it “a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.” The initial proposal, the small great step if you like, is “We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.”
The memo also recognises the pre-existence of the internet. The proposed “servers” will become a means of “A server providing access to the world of Usenet/Internet news articles.”
The prior use of “mesh” becomes apparent, as “The texts are linked together in a way that one can go from one concept to another to find the information one wants. The network of links is called a web.”
The memo identifies and explains “the two building blocks”. The “browser” is “a native application program running on the client machine” while the “server” is “a native application program running on the server machine”. The link, then, is “is specified as an ASCII string from which the browser can deduce a suitable method of contacting an appropriate server.”
The adjectives “suitable” and “appropriate” are telling. In a scientific context, we who are not scientists can recognise if not understand that connectivity between two things requires a fit. But once one reads the words as metaphors the question from a social point of view begins to intrigue. The very words of the memo throw up and continue to throw up a baseline question “what is ‘social’?”
As users, we browse. A frequent metric for determining the democratisation of the web is, one way or another, “how many browsers does our society have?” Can students, can consumers, can employees adequately “browse” is a question which we as political societies ask time and time again.
Yet an equally important question is one directed to the other end of things. The idea of “browsing” presupposes a worth in what is being browsed. This in turn directs our attention to the idea of one’s own pc or laptop or phone being a “client” and to the idea that the source of what is being browsed is something which is “serving” a client.
When we think of the word “client” in the 21st century, we tend to think of a rather upmarket customer or consumer. Historically, the client is anything but, coming from the Latin cliens, a follower or retainer. The client follows the patron and, to complete the circle, the patron serves the needs of the client. It is an example of symbiosis. Whether it is mutualistic, where both gain, or parasitic, where one gains at the expense of the other, is a question which has occupied social commentators through the ages.
For the corporate lawyer investigating intellectual property piracy or for the defence analyst investigating terrorism, the identification of those browsing is merely the identification of the patron’s clients. The patron is using the server, and the server is the thing to be found. Not, in many cases, an easy task, and when we thing about it we should not be surprised. Identifying “information imbalances” is a worthy task but it should never overtake in importance identification of who is creating the “information”.
It is necessarily the case that an invention brings the unknown: an invention is, etymologically, something which “comes in”. We as humans frequently bemoan what comes in with the invention as the unknown new tends to dislocate what is old and known. The peculiar thing about this memo of 12 November 1990 is not only that it heralds the coming in of something new but that it does so in language which carries its own warning.
At the end of the first Spider-Man comic in 1962, the author signed off:
And a lean, silent figure slowly fades in the gathering darkness, aware at last that in this world, with great power there must also come – great responsibility!
How the world wide web we use daily reconciles power and responsibility is an unfolding narrative. Meanwhile, Stan Lee, the author of the words, died on 12 November 2018.
