The Future of the Internet Is Flow

Forget the clunky Web. The future of the online world will be a river of information flowing through time

Illustration: Daniel Hertzberg

Reported By David Gelernter and Eric Freeman, The Wall Street Journal, 10/02/15

People ask where the Web is going; it’s going nowhere. The Web was a brilliant first shot at making the Internet usable, but it backed the wrong horse. It chose space over time. The conventional website is “space-organized,” like a patterned beach towel—pineapples upper left, mermaids lower right. Instead it might have been “time-organized,” like a parade—first this band, three minutes later this float, 40 seconds later that band.

We go to the Internet for many reasons, but most often to discover what’s new. We have had libraries for millennia, but never before have we had a crystal ball that can tell us what is happening everywhere right now. Nor have we ever had screens, from room-sized to wrist-sized, that can show us high-resolution, constantly flowing streams of information.

Today, time-based structures, flowing data—in streams, feeds, blogs—increasingly dominate the Web. Flow has become the basic organizing principle of the cybersphere. The trend is widely understood, but its implications aren’t.

Click here to see the whole article in The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal