The World-Wide-Web as social hypertext

S omething curious is happening on the World-Wide Web. It is undergoing a slow transformation from an abstract, chaotic, information web into what I call a social hypertext. Initially, I didn’t pay much attention to the Web. After all, it was just a new take on distributed information server systems, such as WAIS [8] and Gopher [1]. True, it was easier to use than WAIS, and the ability of Web browsers to display formatted text and graphics with embedded links made it more attractive and engaging than either WAIS or Gopher. But there was nothing really new; it was an incremental advance, a new combination of well-known functionality. So I mentally categorized the Web as just the latest fashion to sweep the Internet. In this I was quite wrong, although the phrasing of my dismissal in terms of fashion contained a deep truth. This isn’t to say I ignored the Web. As a user-experience specialist in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, one of my jobs is to stay abreast of new things. So I occasionally browsed it to see what was happening. Early in 1995 I had a conversion experience. The cause of my change of heart was the widespread appearance of personal pages. Personal pages are similar to informal resumes, except that in addition to professional material they often contain personal information. Hobbies, research interests, pets, professional publications, children, politics, friends, colleagues, all are grist for the personal page. I believe this seemingly frivolous blending of the professional and the personal is the key to why the Web is becoming a fundamentally different creature from the systems of information servers that preceded it. Personal pages and the Web are not being used to “publish information”; they are being used to construct identity—useful information is just a side effect. A personal page is a carefully constructed portrayal of a person. This insight leads me to characterize the Web as a social hypertext. The nodes—at least some of them—are becoming representations of people. And this, in turn, enables another critical feature to emerge: links from a personal page often point to socially salient pages. A common feature of the personal page is a list of pointers to “interesting people and places.” What and who count as interesting? That depends on the person, and hence also tells us more about the person. Thus, the links, The World-Wide Web as Social Hypertext