Early, Prescient Document on the WWW
canopic jug writes:
Digital archivist, David Rosenthal, reviews an old, obscure, but prescient, document from computer scientist Clifford Lynch on various aspects of the then nascent WWW. Lynch's document, Accessibility and Integrity of Networked InformationCollections. Background Paper, from 1993, which covered topics ranging from the First Sale Doctrine, what is now called surveillance capitalism, pay walls, and disinformation:
While doing the research for a future talk, I came across an obscure but impressively prophetic report entitled Accessibility and Integrity of Networked Information Collections that Cliff Lynch wrote for the federal Office of Technology Assessment in 1993, 32 years ago. I say "obscure" because it doesn't appear in Lynch's pre-1997 bibliography.
To give you some idea of the context in which it was written, unless you are over 70, it was more than half your life ago when in November 1989 Tim Berners-Lee's browser first accessed a page from his Web server. It was only about the same time that the first commercial, as opposed to research, Internet Service Providers started with the ARPANET being decommissioned the next year. Two years later, in December of 1991, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center put up the first US Web page. In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee codified and extended the HTTP protocol he had earlier implemented. It would be another two years before Netscape became the first browser to support HTTPS. It would be two years after that before the ITEF approved HTTP/1.0 in RFC 1945. As you can see, Lynch was writing among the birth-pangs of the Web.
Although Lynch was insufficiently pessimistic, he got a lot of things exactly right. Below the fold I provide four out of many examples.
Rosenthal's summary includes a link to a digital copy at the Education Resources Information Center.
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