Electronic Newspaper & Random Associations

1981 broadcast on KRON San Francisco…reading newspapers online (with the exception of pictures, ads, and comics?

“it takes over 2 hours to receive the entire text of the newspaper over the phone and with an hourly use charge of $5 the new tele-paper won’t be much competition to the .20 cent street edition”

Networking and the internet (a network of computers) has been around a long time, but it wasn’t until around 1990 when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web (yeah, notice it does not say Al Gore?). This guy could have been a ka-bajillionaire but instead insisted on non-proprietary and free. That’s how the web began, open source and available to all. Now with ads and special costly software, etc…the web isn’t so free…but everything is cyclical. People like to collaborate and share, opensource is awesome and what the web was meant to be. You can see the big push for open and free has always been there in the background, buzzing, even while people became millionaires with crappy browsers and software. WordPress is an excellent example of the open and free web that Tim had a mind.
His idea started with his own lack of memory and too many notes.

he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep “track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn’t.” -TIME

Wow, from there to creating HTML, URLs, and the rules of http…don’t forget the first browser and server! Way to go Tim! From 1990 to 2009, in less than 19 years we’ve come a long way. I have students who were born after 1990, and have only known the world with the internet in it. Information at their fingertips is all they have known… I think Tim Berners-Lee is my web hero. Right next to the person who created bejeweled (j/k).
It’s interesting to see how far we have come. “Random associations”, that’s so interesting to me. In grad school I studied learning theory and there are so many ideas about how people learn. Ideas of the brain as a black box was big for a while. Information goes in and we don’t really know what happens then, hence a black box. Some say we build schemas, while we may not know everything, we have a these scaffolds that we build upon as our experience grows. Also, there is the idea of a rhizome. Knowledge is intertwined with everything you do, see and here in your life. Like a root, creeping and intertwining with anything in it’s path, sometimes you can’t even separate two plants because their roots are so intertwined. This rhizome idea brings me back to “random associations”. The “world wide web” lingo was used to show connections, like a spider web (or how properly networked of computers can look), but I see fault in that language. A spider web usually stands alone, lots of interconnections of course, but on it’s own. A rhizome on the other hand is interconnected with everything. Think of the root system of a large tree, interconnected and almost inseparable from the plants, grasses, and other trees around it.
Okay so the world wide rhizome (wwr?) doesn’t quite have the same ring to it but I like it. I’ll have to ponder this more later when I have more time…