Internet Futures

Sometimes I feel as if I can barely keep up with the pace of change in technology...and sometimes I'm not sure I want to.  Wired Magazine recently published the article The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet,  suggesting that a major shift in cyberspace may be in the offing.

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting...Blame human nature.  As much as we intellectually appreciate openness, at the end of the day we favor the easiest path.  We’ll pay for convenience and reliability.

Essentially, what Wired is saying is that we've been through the Wild West times in which everyone and anyone could take a hand in shaping the Internet by the way we use the World Wide Web. New sheriffs may be on the scene...and I'm not sure I want to see an end to the gunslingers.
(N.B. The Internet and World Wide Web are not the same.  The World Wide Web is just one way the Internet is used.  Email and apps are other ways.)

I have to say that lately, I myself have felt a change happening on the Web. We are all accustomed to levels of service--basic for free and premium at a cost with more features and more space.  But recently, there seems to be a blatant push to monetize the Web.  The clearest example of this is probably Ning moving out of the business of free and into an entirely fee-based structure.  Wired is saying that something bigger is taking place. The whole show is moving away from the Free Web, which was originally made possible because we can all just wing it out there (and don't look a gift horse in the mouth)...and it's all moving into apps that are standardized in some fashion, do one thing well and for that one thing deliver a higher quality of service.

The marketplace has spoken: When it comes to the applications that run on top of the Net, people are starting to choose quality of service.

In other words, we've matured (for lack of a better word).  We no longer want to suffer the inefficiencies of the World Wide Web.  We want what we want and only what we want, but we want it when we want it, simply and reliably.  This may be what I myself am feeling in the opening statement that I'm not sure I want to keep riding the wave of change on the Internet--just give me something simple I can use.  Nevertheless, I have to question what is lost in this shift.  Wired itself recognizes this question: The Web is one thing we did with the Internet, and apps are another.  But, the Web is more generative because it is more open and demands more of its users.  Apps are "paid, closed, and proprietary" and may endanger the “generative” nature of the Web — those opportunities "that allow people to find new uses" for it (Zittrain).

As an educator working with technology integration in schools, I have long been concerned that we may not be demanding enough of users--especially our digital native students.  Instead, we may be encouraging use of technologies without sufficient understanding of them, and the result may be lost opportunities.  As Jonassen (1994) points out, the people who learn the most from the design and development of computer technologies are its designers.  Too often, we users accept what designers give us routinely rather than reflectively.  The closer we can come to the designer's understanding of what a technology can do, the further we can go in leveraging that technology toward new and exciting possibilities.  In fairness, Wired doesn't suggest that the Web is actually going away, but I hope it will resist being taken over and shrunk, and that it will continue to be a vibrant space with full participation of the many.

The defenders of the unfettered Web have their hopes set on HTML5 — the latest version of Web-building code that offers applike flexibility — as an open way to satisfy the desire for quality of service. If a standard Web browser can act like an app, offering the sort of clean interface and seamless interactivity that iPad users want, perhaps users will resist the trend to the paid, closed, and proprietary. But the business forces lining up behind closed platforms are big and getting bigger. This is seen by many as a battle for the soul of the digital frontier.