Kevin Kelly, the original editor of Wired, offers a bracing tour of how we saw the Web at its inception, and what it has really become, "We Are the Web" (Wired, August 2005).
The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive.
How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan.
Does Kelly overstate the historic significance of the Web? I doubt it, as breathless as his account may seem. I love this essay even though he gets the number of books published last year wrong (using the 2003, rather than the 2004 Bowker figures), and seems to swipe the notion of, if not the term, authorgeddon without attribution. He affirms the fundamental strengths of the Web--its unpredictability and democracy and growth--and reminds us of the ways in which it dwarfs all previous mediums in its virtues and its potential.
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