The Internet: looking back over revolutionary 10 years; looking forward to more

Thanks to the Google newsletter, I ran across a mind-blowing piece on the Internet. A ten year retrospective, followed by insightful, if somewhat “out-there” prognostication:

We all missed the big story. The revolution launched by Netscape’s IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking — part human and part machine — found nowhere else on the planet or in history.

Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don’t see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015 requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.

The biggest surprise:

What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests.

And blogs? Wow, what a surprise!

No Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew about audiences — and they knew a lot — confirmed the focus group belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter.

It gets better when he talks about the future.

Read it all: Wired: “We Are the Web,” by Kevin Kelly

[Update: link has been changed. This is a 5-page story and originally I inadvertently (lawyer-speak for sure) linked to page 3 instead of 1]

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