The Web That Wasn't

Most Interesting Sentence: "In Otlet's world each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document" (Wright, 190).

Early in this article, Wright explains that the World Wide Web might not necessarily have "a happy ending" and that the work of Paul Otlet went from being celebrated to destroyed by the Nazis around the time he died (1944). Indeed, this was not a happy ending for a man such as Otlet who was so ahead of his time.

Such an incident speaks to the social shaping of technology. This theory implies that it is not technology that changes the world, but rather real world events and people that shape and change technology. In this case, Otlet was just unlucky. Names like Vannevar Bush and Tim Berners-Lee are the names that are remembered, and another man of daunting intellect was left to rot in the annals of history despite being a prophet of the Internet age. The work of Eugene Garfield, for example, was capitalized upon by the founders of Google. His page rank algorithm lives on within the Internet's single most prominent entity, while the name of Garfield is largely forgotten (for now).

While technology (the Internet) may have a major impact on the library, it is important to remember that it is the Ted Nelsons and Douglas Engelbarts that are ultimately the ones to put the ball in motion.