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).