Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Timothy Berners-Lee
26 MARCH 1998
Well, normally I am quite happy to address a bunch of people about things
about which I am enthusiastic for about an hour or so, but I won't do that: I
will just address you for five minutes. But it is difficult even to find five
words after having such a flattering description of oneself precede one.
It is a very great honour for me to be here and to be awarded an honorary
degree in a room where 250 people are being given their degrees for which they
have done lots and lots of hard work, rather than just a five-minute talk!
It is nice to be in Colchester. Actually, I did wonder after I read in the
Boston Globe of the couple from Arizona who saw the Colchester television camera
on the World Wide Web and decided to move there, I wondered whether there would
be any space. I thought it might catch on, but I am glad to see that you still
have a certain amount of room to move around in the town!
Actually I must say that a lot of people have been involved in the World Wide
Web. For one thing it was very fortuitous that the Internet had, just in
1989/1990 got to the point in its development (which I was nothing to do with, I
hasten to point out) such that most people in the physics community had
networked computers on their desk tops. So there was that entire group that had
developed the Internet in the preceding 15 years on which the Web relies. From
then on, after a couple of years of trying to persuade everyone that the Web
would be a good idea, it then took off and everything has been put in there by
millions of people using their own creativity: I think that is what is
exciting for me. I wince a little when I am described as the creator of
the World Wide Web because once somebody actually called me after such a
description had been used and said, "Honestly, I can't believe that you created
it. I've browsed some of it and there is so much stuff there you couldn't
possibly have typed it all in!" Fortunately none of you are under that
illusion. But let me clarify a couple of things.
One is that the dreams for the Web originally were maybe not exactly what you
see today. I would say that what you see today is part of the dream
for the Web. The idea was that the Web should be one universal, abstract space
for us to communicate together for living and working together. It should
allow information of any description and on any scale. The idea was that
it would be a very interactive space, so in other words, anybody who has a
browser should also be able to create things. I hope that in the future we
will get to that point, so that, for example, when you are making a family
photograph album you will easily just drag the photographs into an album you can
share immediately with the family. Also it will be very intuitive. When you are
reading something on the Web, perhaps something in your University which you
disagree with, that you can go and annotate it with a big yellow sticker, or the
metaphorical equivalent of a yellow sticker. So part of the original
idea was that the Web would be a very interactive, creative space, in which
everybody could work together.
It was also a dream that once everybody is working in the Web it becomes a
sort of mirror of society, mirror of the organisation, mirror of the
groups who are using it. Then, wouldn't it be fun to start writing
computer programs to analyse it? At the moment, those of you who
have used the Web will find that the only programs you can really use to help
you out there, the only times when you see a machine try to help you, is when
you use a 'search engine'. The search engines are really very crude at the
moment because they don't understand the Web. The Web is written for
people. Now I hope that will change as well. I don't imagine that for a
while computer programs will be able to understand the sorts of things we write
and especially the sorts of things some people write on their Web pages.
However, I think that we will move to a point where, when you are selling your
car, you fill in a form to say you are selling your car. The computer will
understand that that is what you are doing, and automatically match you up with
people who are buying cars, for example.
So those were two parts of the plan. A conclusion from looking at how
things have progressed, is that the Web, even though it is not a very
collaborative medium, is becoming more than just a mirror of society. It
is becoming part of society. So when you put something on the Web, you are
publishing something, you are making an action of a human being, you are not
just making a copy of something which was originally on paper. So as we
build the Web we are building society. People’s interactions over the
Internet are a part of society. When we define new protocols to operate between
computers, when we define what it is actually like to sit in front of a browser,
or a hypertext editor, the sorts of things you can do there actually define the
sorts of society we can build. We have to be aware of this. So we can either
build-in the concept of privacy, of intellectual property (can you actually own
information?) things like that; or we can decide not to build it in and make it
very difficult to actually build a society that has those concepts. There
are a very large number of concepts. Every year we hit new ones, and so the
community of people developing the Web, but also the community of people writing
Web pages, and even browsing the Web, have got to be aware of this. You have got
to remember all the things that you learned perhaps even before you went to
school, and you are still learning now - and we are all still learning - about
the ethics of information and honesty and privacy, etc., and remember that they
still apply on the Web. We are having to relearn them in the new context.
There is one happy thing that I would like to just deposit with you and tear
it up into a lot of pieces so you can pass it around, it is this. Suppose for a
moment we forget all the wonderful things you find on the Web, forget the
wonderful technology. Just the fact that one can go out there and write a
program, think something up and put it on the Internet, and have people pick it
up, and have an idea actually come to fruition, is just very exciting, never
mind what the idea was. So, just the fact that, even though at first people say
that you are crazy or its too complicated, etc., etc., it is possible to have a
dream and for that dream to come true. This dream came true through a lot of
people, and not just my personal effort. So I would like just to let you take
away that incredible hope and apply it to lots of other things. Here you
are, coming to the end of a phase in your life, with a great sigh of relief I
should think, and looking forward to the next phase, and I hope that you dream
carefully - because when you dream you never know where it will take you.
And when you do, I hope very much that for you also, your dreams will come true.