Not only did we fail to imagine what the web would become, we still don’t see it today. We are oblivious to the miracle it has blossomed into. Twenty years after its birth the immense scope of the web is hard to fathom. The total number of web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request, exceeds 60 trillion. That’s almost 10,000 pages per person alive. And this entire cornucopia has been created in less than 8,000 days.
The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, from any window on the internet, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help-wanted ads, satellite images of any place on earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs and real-time prices, pictures of just about anything, latest sports scores, places to buy everything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers—all accessed instantly.
This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze on a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It’s there. Or listen to the daily complaints and pleas of almost anyone who tweets or posts. (And doesn’t everyone?) I doubt angels have a better view of humanity.
Why aren’t we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children back then would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of the wise experts from the 1980s, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone’s 20-year plan. At that time, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn’t enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such bounty. The success of the web at this scale was impossible.
But if we have learned anything in the past three decades, it is that the impossible is more plausible than it appears.
Nowhere in Ted Nelson’s convoluted sketches of hypertext transclusion did the fantasy of a virtual flea market appear. Nelson hoped to franchise his Xanadu hypertext systems in the physical world at the scale of mom-and-pop cafés—you would go to a Xanadu store to do your hypertexting. Instead, the web erupted into open global flea markets like eBay, Craigslist, or Alibaba that handle several billion transactions every year and operate right into your bedroom. And here’s the surprise: Users do most of the work—they photograph, they catalog, they post, and they market their own sales. And they police themselves; while the sites do call in the authorities to arrest serial abusers, the chief method of ensuring fairness is a system of user-generated ratings. Three billion feedback comments can work wonders.
What we all failed to see was how much of this brave new online world would be manufactured by users, not big institutions. The entirety of the content offered by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter is not created by their staff, but by their audience. Amazon’s rise was a surprise not because it became an “everything store” (not hard to imagine), but because Amazon’s customers (me and you) rushed to write the reviews that made the site’s long-tail selection usable. Today, most major software producers have minimal help desks; their most enthusiastic customers advise and assist other customers on the company’s support forum web pages, serving as high-quality customer support for new buyers. And in the greatest leverage of the common user, Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 90 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy. This bottom-up overturning was also not in anyone’s 20-year vision.
No web phenomenon has been more confounding than the infinite rabbit hole of YouTube and Facebook videos. Everything media experts knew about audiences—and they knew a lot—promoted the belief that audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own entertainment. The audience was a confirmed collective coach potato, as the ABC honchos assumed. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply out of reach of amateurs in terms of cost and expertise. User-generated creations would never happen at a large scale, or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the near instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs in the early 2000s, with two new blogs appearing every second. And then a few years later the explosion of user-created videos—65,000 per day are posted to YouTube, or 300 video hours every minute, in 2015. And in recent years a ceaseless eruption of alerts, tips, and news headlines. Each user doing what ABC, AOL, USA Today—and almost everyone else—expected only ABC, AOL, USA Today would be doing. These user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy, and resources coming from?
The audience.
The nutrition of participation nudges ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free encyclopedias, creating free public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the web runs in this mode. One study a few years ago found that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured. The rest is fueled by duty or passion.
Coming out of the industrial age, when mass-produced goods outperformed anything you could make yourself, this sudden tilt toward consumer involvement is a surprise. We thought, “That amateur do-it-yourself thing died long ago, back in the horse-and-buggy era.” The enthusiasm for making things, for interacting more deeply than just choosing options, is the great force not reckoned—not seen—decades ago, even though it was already going on. This apparently primeval impulse for participation has upended the economy and is steadily turning the sphere of social networking—smart mobs, hive minds, and collaborative action—into the main event.
When a company opens part of its databases and functionality to users and other startups via a public API, or application programming interface, as Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, and most large platforms have, it is encouraging the participation of its users at new levels. People who take advantage of these capabilities are no longer a company’s customers; they’re the company’s developers, vendors, laboratories, and marketers.
With the steady advance of new ways for customers and audiences to participate, the web has embedded itself into every activity and every region of the planet. Indeed, people’s anxiety about the internet being out of the mainstream seems quaint now. The genuine 1990 worry about the internet being predominantly male was entirely misplaced. Everyone missed the party celebrating the 2002 flip point when women online first outnumbered men. Today, 51 percent of netizens are female. And, of course, the internet is not and has never been a teenage realm. In 2014 the average age of a user was roughly a bone-creaking 44 years old.
And what could be a better mark of universal acceptance than adoption by the Amish? I was visiting some Amish farmers recently. They fit the archetype perfectly: straw hats, scraggly beards, wives with bonnets, no electricity, no phones or TVs, horse and buggy outside. They have an undeserved reputation for resisting all technology, when actually they are just very late adopters. Still, I was amazed to hear them mention their websites.