The Internet: Genesis 2.0

The origin of the Internet is no longer about its immediate genesis. The fact that Tim Berners-Lee implemented the first ever communication between an http client and server on December 25, 1990, is no longer interesting. Instead the Web's development has gone the way of most revolutionary phenomena: if reexamined the right way (whether backwards, after drinking a magical concoction, or by substituting every third letter with "e") it eventually seems like a prophesied inevitability.

Alex Wright's recent New York Times article "The Web that Time Forgot" is not exactly prophetic, but it does contextualize the inter-web as a preexisting concept. Wright investigates the case of Paul Otlet, the oft-overlooked founder of Information Science whose concepts for a vast interlinked web of documents, files, and images prefigures the Internet by about 50 years. Among other innovative ideas, Otlet's index card-based system anticipated hyperlinking, a feature that infinitely expands the information in a given text.

And yet, Wright's analysis is just one of several projected genealogies that reconstructs this evolution. In fact, The New York Times ran a similar piece called "Borges and the Foreseeable Future" just six months earlier. In this article, Noam Cohen argued that the Argentine author's stories also presaged Web 2.0. It's a provocative assertion, but Cohen's examples have a forced quality that evokes the single-minded perspective of a Nostradamus enthusiast more so than a discerning journalist (which he typically is).

Tlön, Uqbar, and Wikipedia

Despite a lingering affinity for the printed word, paper pages are sadly going the way of the Papyrusosaurus. To avoid total extinction, however, that tome of trivia, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, will remodel itself upon the very thing that sucked the musty life from its yellowed pages. Wikipedia, the credibility-challenged, community-composed encyclopedia, may have been poo-pooed by journalists and purists since its inception, but there's no denying its popularity. The EB has therefore announced that it will turn its website into "a community for scholars, experts, and lay contributors," a setup that would mimic Wikipedia's orgy of digital information. Albeit with certain stipulations for sophistication. Though the website opens its virtual doors, academic elitists need not fear — the actual leather-bound volumes will remain untainted by the much-maligned "lay contributor."

Students of epistemology and/or navel-gazing may recognize this philosophical quandary. After all, one of Jorge Luis Borges' most famous stories, Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius, breaks down these same precepts of intellectual authority with dismissive glee. In the Argentine writer's slim satire, a secret society conspires to create a nonexistent world and thereby bring it into existence via popular misperception. Naturally, they go about doing so by publishing selected chapters about this fictitious universe within a common encyclopedia. As belief in this imaginary world becomes more widespread, Earth itself begins to change, and, thanks to the Berkelian principle of causality, nearly transforms into an alternative reality by the story's end.


Returning, then, to the question of empirical existentialism we must ask ourselves: Was self-proclaimed environmental messiah and former-Vice President Al Gore always "a blood drinking semi-reptilian douche bag," or did he only become one after his Wikipedia page described him as such?