Masters of Our Shifting Paradigm
By Dale Dougherty
In the heightened buzz of our industry, we seem to go through paradigms the way we go through fads, or issues of Wired magazine. But as Thomas Kuhn used the term in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a paradigm shift happens when concepts that we trust to be true change out from under us.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web paradigm, has written a new book, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (HarperSanFrancisco), that explains how the Web came to be and what it ought to become. Berners-Lee was an Englishman living in France and working in Switzerland at CERN when he dreamed up the idea of a universal information space. Moreover, unlike theorists such as Ted Nelson, he brought the Web into being using some fairly simple ideas: a transfer protocol, a data format, and a distributed addressing mechanism for linking documents. He understood how these simple ideas of hypertext would scale when married to the emerging Internet.
One test of a paradigm shift might be the difficulty with which we're able to recover the old paradigm and make much sense of it. A college student today is likely to think that the invention of the Web was obvious, and that it's rather hard to understand the world that existed before it, even though the Web is not yet ten years old.
From my involvement in those early days, I know personally that a lot of people just didn't "get" the Web until the Web got them. Berners-Lee first announced the Web on the newsgroup alt.h
