Where Do They Find the Time

In 1492, while Christopher Columbus was exploring the Atlantic Ocean in search of the Indies, Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim in western Germany, was struggling against the disruptive impact of the printing press. Johannes Gutenberg had invented movable type around 1439, making it possible to print a book faster than a person could read the book. This famously ushered in a new age of literacy and a transformation of society that included the Protestant Reformation. But, 50 years after its introduction, Abbott Trithemius was facing the concrete effects of the printing press on the monks and scribes whose sole mission in life was to transcribe appropriate materials for the reading public. For 50 years both methods of book production had existed in parallel, but it was becoming increasingly obvious that the life and mission of the scribe was being eliminated one book at a time. Trithemius finally resorted to writing a treatise on the importance of maintaining the life of the scribe in society. He produced De Laude Scriptorum ("In Praise of Scribes"), in which he laid out the values and virtues of the scribal tradition. He described four benefits that accrue from writing books versus printing them: 1) the precious time of human life is valuably spent; 2) the scribe's understanding is enlightened as he writes; 3) his heart is kindled with devotion through his writing; and 4) after this life, the scribe is rewarded with a unique prize (1). Trithemius' treatise focused on the value of transcription to those who are doing the transcribing, not those who need the books. This perspective and concern are common and often repeated when a new technology threatens an old one. The livelihood of individuals is threatened, social foundations are shaken, economic models are broken, and whole classes of people experience unease with the new shape of the world. I described this type of creative destruction in my last column (RTM May/June 2008), but this time I want to use these ideas to look at the emergence of the participative web that is occurring all across the Internet, sometimes referred to as "web 2.0" or "the social web." The Participative Web Until a few years ago, the Internet and the Web were places where established organizations created and published content for the rest of the world to consume, digest and use in some way. Bulletin boards and private web sites certainly existed, but they were created by a very small minority of technical literati with the unique skills to accomplish what much larger organizations were doing. But then in 1995 Ward Cunningham created the Wiki, which was followed by Classmates.com during that same year. These introduced the first social networks and shared web sites. In 1997, Jorn Barger introduced the Web Log (a.k.a. Blog), which allowed people to easily publish a running stream of material in the form of a newspaper, gossip column or diary. Slowly web users began to realize that they could publish their own Internet content as easily as creating a business document. Ten years later there were millions of personally published web sites. Technorati currently tracks over 112 million blogs, Wikipedia contains over 10 million articles in 250 languages, YouTube contains over 83 million videos, MySpace hosts over 100 million user pages, and Flickr contains over 3 billion photos (2). A modern Abbott Trithemius might ask, "What will this do to the official information providers in society?" and "Where do people come up with the time to do this?" The answer to Trithemius's first question is unfolding every day as we witness the loss of consumers of newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts. One viewer at a time is discovering the interesting, unique and niche-oriented material on YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, and Wikipedia. The ultimate answer seems clear; the web is supplanting the television as a source of entertainment and information in the same way that the television supplanted radio and newspapers in a previous generation. …