Sir Tim Berners-Lee stopped by HP’s Research Labs on Tuesday. He’s the guy who invented the World Wide Web. Unlike the plutocrats at Google, Yahoo, eBay and the many others who’ve grown fat and happy off the web, Tim remains an academic, seemingly of modest means, as excited by the technology as ever.

It was back in 1989 that he began work at CERN in Switzerland on the basic HTML and http protocols which form the foundation of the Web. There was a time in 1991-92 when he had a list of every web server in the world on a piece of paper in his office drawer. There are now millions upon millions being served. There are few people in the world alive today whose innovation have had such an effect on so many.

Yet to hear Tim (although Knighted by Her Majesty he prefers informality) describe it, when he was first outlining his concept of linked pages on a world-wide network to rooms filled with of smart people in the late 1980’s only two or three in each group of 100 “got” it. So goes the uphill struggle to communicate change. The best & brightest often cannot see the benefits of truly radical innovation. Many inventors have the devil’s own job communicating the advantages of their new idea to others.

I recently wrote about Robert Chesebrough, the inventor of Vaseline, who suffered self-inflicted burns to demonstrate the effectiveness of his product. There’s the tenacious Ed Lowe, inventor of Kitty-Litter who “started visiting cat shows, where he cleaned hundreds of cat boxes each day in exchange for a booth to display his new product.”

The story of the 30-year struggle of the English inventor and lone genius John Harrison to prove his clocks provide a solution to the problem of a ship’s longitude position at sea are wonderfully told in Dava Sobel’s book.

So it was refreshing to hear Berners-Lee talk. His speech lacks the polish of the corporate suits. Indeed, as one audience member commented, it lacks linear thoughts and meanders from link to link as does the web. “Yeah,” Berners-Lee responded, “linear sucks.” The observation that his presentation style matches the web is not a trivial one. He stated that “I’ve been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) Web sites. The brain we study is as complex a system.”

Is the logic of a formal presentation or speech with a beginning, middle and end and one rhetorical section leading in a linear fashion to the next soooo last century (not to mention the dozen or so preceding centuries)? Will future generations raised on the interconnections of the web prefer to absorb presentations of linked hypertext? Who knows.

What we can see, in the non-linear tradition in literature is a prescient demonstration that the “linear sucks”. As far back as the 18th Century with Tristram Shandy, published by author Laurence Stern in nine volumes that had neither a beginning or end, a celebration of digression and multiple plot-lines. The tradition segues into Nabokov’s Pale Fire; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds and so on.

Many of these novels mix poetry and prose. And on the web, sprung from Berners-Lee’s Swiss-time imaginings, we find poems which celebrate randomness and chance in the late-time twitters of people saying what they are doing now:

eve11: Confectioners sugar matte icing powdered over gothic cake...what the Salt Flats look like at the bewitching hour of slate blue dusk. November 21, 2007

TwitterPoetry: Winds buffet the twitterpoem, casting thoughts and emotions about with wild abandon. March 31, 2007

LloydDavis: Waiting for lunch date on bench in sloane square. Feeling rather george smiley... November 27, 2007


In the end the poets say it best:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu.
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?

T.S. Eliot The Waste Land