The BBC News website is carrying a transcript of Mark Lawson's brief August 9th Newsnight interview with Tim Berners-Lee - inventor of the World Wide Web, "Greatest Briton" and, most importantly of course, physicist. In many interviews, Berners-Lee is asked to discuss the beginnings of the web. Here though, the conversation is focused on the nature of the web, its evolution as a creative medium, and the natural pitfalls of any endeavor that is so open and unregulated. As a blogger myself, I liked what Berners-Lee has to say about the blogging phenomenon
"...if you go randomly picking up pieces of paper in the street or leafing through garbage at the garbage dump what are the chances you'll find something reliable written on the paper that you find there? Very small. When you go onto the internet, if you really rummage around randomly then how do you hope to find something of any of value? But when you use the web, you follow links and you should keep bookmarks of the places where following links turns out to be a good idea. When you go to a site and it gives you pointers to places that you find are horrible or unreliable, then don't go there again. You see out there right now, for example, when you look at bloggers some of them are very careful. A good blogger when he says that something's happened will have a point to back, and there's a certain ethos within the blogging community, you always point to your source, you point all the way back to the original article. If you're looking at something and you don't know where it comes from, if there's no pointer to the source, you can ignore it."
The analogy he makes in the first paragraph certainly resonates with me. Getting reliable information from the web definitely requires more work than entering the appropriate search phrase into Google and clicking on the first few links. If one uses the web enough, one quickly develops one's own ways of determining whether a site is accurate, or helpful, or trustworthy. This is not a foolproof exercise, but neither are the ways in which one makes the same decisions about books, movies or television. Hopefully some people find Cosmic Variance to be in the right category. One of the things that make reading British news such fun, at least for me, is how relatively unguarded British journalists are. They are often prepared to express things in the way that they feel is natural, without worrying about petty social consequences. Can you imagine an interviewer for a major U.S. network asking the following question in just this way?
"You must reflect though on the law of unintended consequences because it wasn't remotely ever your intention when you started on this that so much of the web would be given over to sexual exhibitionists masturbating in their bedrooms with webcams. Do you ever have bad moments about that?"
Perhaps I'm overly nostaligic about the journalism around which I grew up, but it's a cute little interview anyway.
