The Invisible Web
October 20, 2008
Last week I had a piece in Campaign magazine in the UK about my Digital Viewpoint.
This is a new series they are running every once in a while which ask someone to paint a portrait of the future - how they see the digital landscape developing.
Mine focused on the web becoming invisible.
Invisible technology is a concept coined by Heidegger to describe tools that stop being tools and become integral aspects of how we live in and experience the world, extensions of ourselves.
His example is a blind person's cane. My point was that only when the web is as integrated as that, in ways that are hinted at by the 'mobile' web and augmented reality applications, will we really understand the impact it will make on the world.
At the end it gets a bit Matrix but that's what I think is going to happen. Serious. You ain't seen nothing yet.
Have a look and let me know what you think:
I'm the second in the series. The first piece was written by Vint Cerf - one of the guys who invented the Internet.
Not the web - that was Tim - but the INTERNET. He helped create the TCP/IP protocols and is known as the father of the Internet.
He's now Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.
Having me follow him is an hilariously bathetic shift in register but I couldn't be more honoured to type in his wordsteps: