When the Worldwide Web Was a Marvel - and a Mystery

If you can think back to a time before Amazon, before Google, before Facebook and Twitter and even before My Space, you might remember how the worldwide web was first breaking into the public collective consciousness. In Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now, former editor of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger describes how his newspaper encountered the early web and tried to understand what it meant – and how to make it work.  

This new thing had arrived on the communications landscape, and no one understood if it even mattered, or what you might do with it. At the exact same time Rusbridger was grappling with the question at The Guardian, we were grappling with it out our company. His efforts had one major advantage over ours – a small “skunk works” of IT people at the newspaper were working on the technical idea of the web for the newspaper. At our company, the IT organization had looked at the web idea and concluded that it was a passing fad, that the business’s future was more in the province of software programs like Lotus Notes. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Umberto via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Technology: A Love-Hate Relationship

I’m in New Orleans for a treasured aunt’s funeral, sitting in my 88-year-old mother’s kitchen, some 650 miles away from my office. It’s four in the morning. I’m connected online via my mother’s landline. We make do with what’s available. My company’s CEO is in Switzerland for a big business conference that will be livestreamed over the internet. The plan is for people at the event to livetweet, and I will retweet them. The program will last one hour.

Nothing goes according to plan. The people in Switzerland forget to livetweet. The livestream will work only herky-jerky over the landline. The company is announcing a big initiative, and we have to livetweet it. I feel the panic rising.

Yes, we make do with what’s available. I pirate the next-door neighbor’s wifi, pull up the livestream, and begin to tweet a meeting 5,000 miles from where I’m sitting. No one knows that I’m not in the room in Switzerland. And by following the stream via the meeting’s hashtag, I can periodically retweet photos and what others are recording. I end up with 45 tweets in an hour. I quickly assemble the tweets into a narrative flow and post them on the company’s blog.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.