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Clip 1

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Clip 2

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Transcript of Clip 1

Intv: Do you think that generations growing up, the new generation growing up with the web, think differently from other generations?

Tim Berners-Lee: Well it's clear that even people who have, like me, who started off without the web and now use it, work differently. When we want to think of something we tend to often just reach for the keyboard, because we have assumed that we can find stuff. Now people say, I don't know, but the people that-, they've measured that people are not remembering so much. I don't know, but I know that the way I work very often assumes that I can go for my computer helper, for my web, as a helper,
the web is an extension of my brain er when I'm roaming. So my little interface to the web is too expensive to use, I feel as though suddenly I've got one hand tied behind my back, because the usual sort of instinctive reaction to whip it out, I have to hold back and try
to actually think things out.

Intv: Do you think social networking is irrevocably changing our relationships, one with another? That that is almost a logical progression from what the web is about, in a way? That it's about connecting and this is actually going to change human relationships?

Tim Berners-Lee: I think the web's about a lot of things. The web is about, you know, it's connecting humanity, alright, the web is humanity connected. That includes a lot of things, and friends is one of them. I think the social networking systems we have at the moment are, in a way, in their infancy. Typically they allow you to
deal with the concept of a friend, and a photograph, and whether a friend is in a photo, and where I'm going, but in fact my life is much more complex than just having a set of friends. I have all kinds of groups er I want to share different things with er different people. I want to go through different sorts of social protocols that you might
do on the web, like figuring out where to meet, I will do with business colleagues. And figuring out whether er what sort of film would be good for me to watch, I will do with my friends perhaps. There are all kinds of different things that I do in different cases. I think that we'll end up with much more complicated things, don't know whether we'd still call them social networking, but our interactions, as we interact through the web, I think will include more and more things called social machines. Things where
er just like booking a meeting room er or organising a trip, or building a photograph album er or, for that matter, reviewing a scientific paper and deciding which one should be published. Things where people are doing the work, but the machinery of the web is allowing them to work, is actually doing the administration of linking together into a bigger machine.

Intv: As we look at things like climate change and sort of big challenges, do you think the web is, in its ability to share knowledge and find answers through sharing knowledge, is going to be one of the great ways in which we can combat, you know, these big problems facing humanity?

Tim Berners-Lee: I don't think it's going to be sufficient, but I think it's going to be essential. I think for these huge problems that we have in medical fields, trying to understand the brain, understand Alzheimer's, understand cancer er the huge problem of understanding the planet. Here we have this planet, we know it's in trouble, we know it's sick. We really have got so much information about it we have to put together, we have to understand it, we have to then model it, understand how it will change, what things we do will do to it in a long term. So,
yes, that's a huge amount of information, it's a huge amount of data. It's also a huge amount of stuff in people's heads that they may not have put down. Ideas that they might have about how things interact. I think we're going to need the power of networking all that data together into a web of data, certainly, in order to be able
to solve those problems.

Intv: Talk to me a bit about the semantic web then, what is the ability, in essence, what is the semantic web, or the link data web, and what is its potential?

Tim Berners-Lee: Simply that the web of link data is the web which has got on it all the things on your computer which are data rather than documents. So a document is something, you write a letter to your friend, but your calendar is data. So, different thing about data, when you look at the calendar data you don't read the data itself, you look at a day view or you look at a week view, or month view, you can take all the calendars of your friends and smoosh them together so that you've got them on the same day. You can ask the
calendar to work things out, like when will all your friends be available to go and have lunch. You can put onto the calendar information which is-, other information which is public. All kinds of things er when groups are playing near you, football. When you're doing that, you are taking
data together and you're manipulating it, and you're looking at it from different views. That's the sort of thing you can do with
data. Now, most of the data which is out there on the web isn't there so you can do things with it. I can't pull it into calendar, I can't pull it into a spreadsheet. I can't look at it on a timeline. If I'm a geneticist I can't look at it using the tools that geneticists use to look at genetic material, because it's been published in a paper. It's there as a pdf file, so I can print it, but I can't do things with it, I
can't analyse it. So I think it's a big frustration to scientists, but it's a big frustration also to business people who want to plan their days. In fact it turns out that when you look at all the different sorts of data there's a huge amount of it, and what's really valuable is the way it connects together. So it's not just that I want to look at a particular meeting, it's that I want to look at the person who's organising it and I want to look at-, I want to go to the information about the
organisation that they're running, and I want to find out what's its market cap, where is it, where is it invested? Or in which countries is it invested, which sorts of government do they have? Let's look at that government, when was it elected, who runs it? Where did he come from, where did he go to school, what sort of a school is it?
Now, just as you're surfing the web, you can surf through all the data, but the difference with data is that when you've found an interesting pattern, like oh, I found that somebody-, I found that all the members of the board went to the same school. The web of data it'll show me all the companies I'm dealing with, where all the members of the board went to the same school. It's a query to a database,
just looking at all the data out there, if it were available I'd be able to ask all kinds of questions which nobody had asked before, and getting answers back in a very much more powerful way. So, the link data web is in a way more powerful than the web when it comes to being analysed and re-used.

Intv: What's the spirit of the web?

Tim Berners-Lee: The spirit of the web. The spirit of the web, the beginning, was of people working as it were under the bed [clothes] with the light on. People working after the other people had gone home, and installing a web server and setting an email saying 'Oh, by the way, at the end of the work day I installed this web server, I put some photographs on it, hope you like it.' Or 'I put up all our documentation in the web form, just in case you're interested
in it.' Er most of these people did it because they thought it was a good idea at the time, and of course we do lots of things because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and a lot of them turn out to be a terrible idea a bit later. So it's worth celebrating the ones where actually it was a good idea, I think. So the spirit is partly if-,
if everybody did this, this will be really cool, and there's some people who will, when there's something like that, that if everybody did it, it will be really cool, they'll do it. So those people are the people who kick off these network-based things. But things which are networks, which are where everything's connected, like the telephones. As Bob [Macroff] pointed out that, when you sell the first
telephone it's difficult because you can't phone anybody with it. The value of one piece depends on how much else there is there. So people looked at the web and thought, 'Oo, if there was a lot of global hypertext out there it'll be really neat, so I will put some out there anyway.' And right now with data it's the same thing, people are saying, 'Well, there's not a huge
amount of data out there, but the bit that's out there is really neat, and if there was lots out there it will be great, so I'm going to put my bit out there.'

Intv: Do you think the web says something very positive about human nature?

Tim Berners-Lee: The human nature that I came across from the work from the early web developers, it was very open, very giving, people very much working together, encouraging each other. Very much full of excitement, getting a kick out of making things work, and very much out of making things work together. I think the collaborative spirit of it was a driver for most of the people, even though they worked by themselves sometimes, because the nearest sort of web enthusiast may have been hundreds of miles away er they were connected up over the network. And I think the fact that they were
connected up through email lists initially and of course the early websites um I think probably was a very important part of it.

Intv: Do you feel that the web is really a reflection of who we are?

Tim Berners-Lee: From the technical point of view the web is supposed to be a blank sheet of paper. The web itself is not supposed to predispose anybody to use it for one particular subject or for one particular type of material. It's not suppose to really-, it doesn't predispose even to do good stuff. You can put up a bad website, or page, or terrible, or brilliant web page. It's just like the white piece of paper. So when we look out there and we see what a lot of
wonderful stuff there is and what a lot of junk there is, yes, we have ourselves to blame, this is humanity, this is how humanity is. There's lots of wonderful stuff andÌý a lot of junk happening, some of the junk aspiring to be wonderful stuff. Um often the question of what's wonderful and what's junk is clearly
defined by science. Sometimes, often, what's wonderful and what's not is extremely subjective when it comes to music and art. So, when you look out there we've got only ourselves to blame for what's out there. If you look out there and you think that there's an area of the web where really it could be a lot better, well, go and make it better. Go and make a better website. Go and write a better essay. Go and make some better sets of links to more
useful material. It's always put the challenge out there. So when somebody complains about it I point out two things; you don't have to read the junk, you can restrict yourself to reading the things that you like, and you can always contribute. So I think it's really important, the technology of the
web, and the way the web is run by society allows people to go out and contribute, and to go fix it and make it better.

Transcript of Clip 2

Intv: How would you [characterise] the effect of the web on nation states? You know, western democracies on one hand, but then authoritarian regimes like China and perhaps Iran on another?

TimWell the web naturally, as a technology, tends to lead to openness. It makes openness easy and closedness more difficult. So one of the nice things has been where we've seen that countries that tend to be rather closed and where information flow was not very good, have used the internet in fact, to open up. It's unfortunate when we find a
country where there has been a very strong clampdown. My feeling is that there is, maybe independent of the internet, an inexorable movement
towards openness. That as people learn more about other countries, as people learn more about the world, then they demand more. They connect more and they push back against the borders. And once you've allowed
openness it's very difficult to push it back. So I hope that there will be a general move towards openness and each country bit by bit will become open and-, when it comes to information, and therefore become
a better base for an informed electorate and an informed democracy.

Intv: When you were developing the web, did you think about, I suppose, this idea-, it is fundamentally a globalising force, a trans-national force. It allows communities, or people, to connect across borders. Countries aren't on the web, individuals are, and individual websites and communities are built from those websites. Is that something that you were intrigued by when you were thinking about the web and developing it?

TimCertainly the fact that the web breaks down those geographical boundaries is really interesting, and it's not clear that the effect of that has at all, really, come to er come to full fruition. We've seen, yes, people will chat to people in other countries er they find it difficult to do that across
time zones maybe, but you get-, certainly there are strong
communities which are international. But still, a lot of things are still geographical. Now imagine that you are part of a town, you're in a
school, you're in a town, you're er in a region and you're in a country and you're in a continent. Now imagine though that everybody picked those randomly, they would be in one continent, they would deal with affairs of a different continent, and a country which was not in that continent, and they would deal with another region which was not in either of those, and a town which was not in any of those and then they would go to a school which was not in any of the above. Can you
imagine then they'd have a very different view of the world er and we don't have anything like that amount of sort of twistedness about the way we connect. So we've got the ability to connect to people in the world, just as, you know, a town has got the ability to twin with another town. But it takes a lot of energy. Maybe it takes um the brain learning
how to do it, I don't know. Maybe it's something which people are really not that much suited for. They find it exciting to have a certain amount of contact outside the local area, but also, they're comfortable with people that they meet locally and, in fact, to a certain extent, they find life easier when all their circles of interest are nicely nested one
inside each other, with home in the middle.

Intv: Do you think censorship is ever justified? Web censorship.

TimDo I think web censor-, I think that there are always illegal-, there are things which are illegal, like child pornography, incitement to violence, there are things which our society has decided should be made illegal, and those are illegal whether they happen on the web or not. So when those-, when that sort of thing happens, then I think it's reasonable for authorities to take
force, to use force to stop people doing things, to block information which is really er which has crossed that boundary, which has crossed the boundary into the criminal. Society continually reviews, using the existing systems er reviews that boundary between what is just horrible but stuff that we tolerate er for free speech, and stuff where we draw the line and we say no. Free speech or no free speech, that is too horrible to allow, or it's too
dangerous to allow. We continually have to adjust that boundary.ÌýÌýÌý

Intv: Are you worried that sometimes the web sometimes allows cranks to speak under [pranks] in a sense in which it can balkanise communities as well as bring people together? Is that something that has bothered you as you've watched the web develop?

Tim Berneres-Lee: Well there are these two concerns, and they're really opposite, and they're both [strongly] strongly expressed. So one of them is the balkanisation problem. Isn't it true that people who belong to a particular cult can set up their email so that they can only get email from other people in the cult, and when they go to a website the website only links to other websites which believe the strange things that these people behave? And don't you then get people who end up sitting just by their computers,
communicating in such a way that when they meet-, they come out of the cellar and meet somebody in the street, the only thing in common with them is-, they have nothing in common, the only way they can communicate with them is to shoot
them? No, that is one vision of a horrible cultural pothole. Then the other frightening vision is, isn't it true that once everybody can communicate with everything, then everybody will end up just going to the same website? Won't everybody just go to this great, big McDonald's culture, which will hand us out the music we'll all watch and the art we'll all appreciate, and the language which we'll all start speaking, which will lose a huge number of long words and it'll become very simple? Won't we all-, when all the teams of the world end up speaking the same language over
the internet and end up growing up to be adults who have actually no culture at all? So that is the extreme of the mono-culture, the fright that we'll all just be one bland very, very broad culture and then the contrast, of course, with the worry that we're going to be a bunch of very narrow ones. Now, I think, in fact, the wonderful thing is that people naturally avoid those very much. If you find yourself in
too bland a culture you go and spend some time with a smaller group. If you spend too much time in a small group, oo, you get out and do something and, you know, and read a newspaper about the world. So, and in fact of course we're involved in all kinds of things at a national level, the city level, in groups and schools and so on. So in fact, all these different scales, or different size of community which we're involved in, I think people naturally need to be involved in
different scales. They need to spend some time by themselves, sometime worrying about the planet, but also of everything in between, because people have that natural tendency to get involved in lots of different communities. So, they tie individual communities together. You've heard of act locally, think globally? Well, there's also act globally, think locally. There's act nationally, think globally. There's
all these combinations, and because people are doing that, they're acting in one domain but they're thinking about another size of community while they're doing it, because of this overlap, I think people naturally steer us away from each of these horrible extremes, toward a big tangled up, very complex but wonderful mess of entangled humanity.