
Suggested citation format:
Ciolek, T. Matthew. 1996. Today's WWW - tomorrow's MMM? The specter of multi-media mediocrity. IEEE COMPUTER, January 1996, Vol 29(1) pp. 106-108.
www.ciolek.com/PAPERS/MMM.html

Today's WWW - tomorrow's MMM?
The specter of multi-media mediocrity

Dr T. Matthew Ciolek,
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,
Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia
tmciolek@coombs.anu.edu.au
http://www.ciolek.com/PEOPLE/ciolek-tm.html

Document created: 7 Jan 1996. Links last checked: 11 Mar 2000.


[Originally published in IEEE COMPUTER, January 1996, Vol 29(1) pp. 106-108.
Also, republished in: http://rs306.ccs.bbk.ac.uk/bcs-nsg/webfut.htm
Also, reprinted in: Educom Review, May/June 1997, pp. 23-26.]

There are good reasons to believe that the unparalleled flowering and growth of the World Wide Web may ultimately prove to be a curse rather than a blessing. In January 1995, according to the Lycos crawler database, over 2 million WWW documents were published on line. In early August 1995, Lycos had to keep track of 5.07 million Web pages. Two months later, in late September, Lycos tracked 10.75 million pages. As of Monday, December 11, 1995, at 19:29 (Pacific Time), there were an estimated 297,900 World Wide Web sites on the Internet.

Certainly, information technology professionals are delighted that since the early 1990s they have been able to inspect and work with each other's hypertext files whenever and wherever they want. Similarly, it is exciting to know that the realm of WWW resources is growing exponentially and that every week powerful technological innovations are devised and implemented. Nevertheless, two elementary questions remain unanswered.

The first concerns the ratio of total volume of networked information (measured in megabytes) to information useful to scholars--or to anyone, for that matter. Is the ratio around 1:1? 100:1? 1,000:1 ? or perhaps even greater? The other question regards long-term trends and prospects for the quality and reliability of WWW-based information resources. Are we, with the passage of time, being blessed with an ever-reaching, ever-faster, and over-arching information matrix of true reliability, or are we being cursed with tomorrow's multimedia mediocrity?

These questions cannot be overlooked or taken lightly, for they directly affect our own future and electronic well-being. And, unfortunately, the networked future looks far from rosy.

The sins and turmoil of the Web

The Web is the global sum of the uncoordinated activities of several hundreds of thousands of people who deal with the system as they please. It is a nebulous, ever-changing multitude of computer sites that house continually changing chunks of multimedia information (numeric values, text, graphic images, sound tracks, video clips, and data-input forms), all arranged in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. This information is displayed on millions of pages (files) wired together by multiple hypertext links. If the WWW were compared to a library, the "books" on its shelves would keep changing their relative locations as well as their sizes and names. Individual "pages" in those publications would be shuffled ceaselessly. Finally, much of the data on those pages would be revised, updated, extended, shortened, or even deleted without warning almost daily.

Thus, the Web's chief structural feature is its permanent state of flux, its fundamental inability to offer "Internauts" either a sense of constancy of information or any real stability of location for its electronic repositories. A state of flux is intrinsic to the nature of the Web, so that any attempt to curb it is bound to inflict on the Web phenomenon a violent shock, loss of vitality, and finally a rapid death; or, more likely, the regulatory attempt itself will result in a dismal failure. In other words, the WWW is very unlike the traditional world of books, research journals, and microfilm, and it cannot now be made to emulate them.

Any complications and problems arising from the dynamic and near-chaotic state of the Web are further compounded by the behavior of people and institutions that manage sites on the system. I refer here to organizational problems such as abysmal and wasteful replication of effort by different parties claiming to be the Internet's main site for a given field of specialization; lust and carelessness bordering on promiscuity with which maintainers of Web pages establish links to other related (and frequently unrelated) sites and pages; and labyrinthine circularity of links, forcing readers to jump for minutes on end from site to site in search of a server that publishes its own data instead of pointing to other catalogs. Other Web sins include chronic lack of communication and cooperation between maintainers of sites specializing in similar subject areas, as well as passivity and lack of feedback from readers who use a site.

However, the greatest sin of all is an absurd fascination with technological issues at the expense of any serious thought as to the raison d'etre of the WWW, namely information itself. Our greatest folly seems to be our willingness to cultivate this global communication system, open to all and sundry, without first ensuring that we have enough useful and trustworthy, accurate and timely information to be circulated across such a networked behemoth.

It is strange indeed that reams upon reams of electronic pages are created to deal with secondary issues such as SGML and HTML style sheets, telecommunication and interface standards, delivery of the latest browser and server software, and so on and so forth without anyone's ever bothering to ask, What is the Web to be used for? How do we define and judge the quality of electronic information? What are the minimal standards to be observed? How might these standards differ from those developed for other forms of publication?

If the World Wide Web, which originated as a communication tool for scholars and researchers working at the cutting edge of the sciences, is to have a valid future, these issues urgently need to be tackled. We must investigate notions of information quality and make them applicable to material published on the Web.

For instance, would the idea of accuracy remain equally important across such a wide range of documents as news bulletins, dictionaries, medieval wheat prices, mantissae in a table of logarithms, phone numbers, photographs of Elvis Presley, photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, maps of major historic battles, maps of airports, drawings of flowers and shock-absorbers, and sound files of classical music and of the Nobel Prize acceptance speech by the Dalai Lama?

And what about timeliness of information and the related issue of file update frequency? Are news files to be updated every 12 hours? or 6 hours? or every hour? Maybe it should happen continuously. Are on-line history handbooks to be modified and updated every month, every year, or every decade? Or should they be revised each time, without fail, that another politically correct linguistic twist becomes fashionable? Also, how often should Mendeleev's periodic table be updated?

Clearly, a mighty task awaits site managers, one that must be handled in close cooperation with librarians, scholars, publishers, and philosophers. However, the analysis and successful resolution of all these methodological issues will be only part of a greater battle. Web- and Net-related standards still need to be drafted and circulated on the Net so that they can be seen and eventually put in to practice by the people involved in shaping the Web.

Difficulties in reforming the Web

The major battle, if and when it is fought, will be about the minimal content standards for the Web. It is going to be a bloody, uphill struggle against hundreds of thousands of people who love publishing on line simply because publishing is now feasible and inexpensive. The present body of the WWW is determined largely by the developers' hunger for recognition and applause from their peers. And who are these developers? My observations suggest that they include primarily

One thing seems clear: Those with access (and copyright) to ample and high-quality factual and/or scholarly materials are in the minority. Hence, sites will inevitably vie with each other for the status of being the Web's biggest (in terms of the cataloged hypertext links and the size of their logos), or most technically advanced (in terms of the speed and capacity of their search engines, interactivity, CGI scripts, and gateways to other software systems), or most colorful and dazzling (in terms of visual effects and virtual-reality technologies).

We can now see how this self-referential loop is formed: Good data is not readily forthcoming, hence the preoccupation with hypertext and multimedia techniques, and the "cool" appearance of pages. This motivates the WWW culture to revolve around the bigger and better "containers" for information and not around the information itself. Thus, the World Wide Web Consortium, major Web sites, and software houses regularly ignore the question of Web content and fuss exclusively about new tools and applications:

With such a simplistic view of the Web, it's no wonder the so-called "great flow of information on the Internet" in 1995 proved to be mainly a tide of colorful snippets, advertising leaflets, cybermalls, tele-cafes, personal home pages, tedious corporate mission statements, and sporadic pages of unattributed and unreferenced data culled from paper sources. Whether this flood of cyber junk will ever be halted remains to be seen.

The World Wide Web is extremely large and unruly, and thus it is very difficult to influence or reengineer. The system's vastness and its individualistic, polycentric, nonhierarchical mode of operation are simultaneously the source of its tremendous vitality and its weakness. Bad solutions and erroneous practices cannot be imposed arbitrarily on the WWW. Yet, by the same token, good ideas are not necessarily embraced by the population of Web maintainers, because the overall system has by now grown so large and so multilayered that in the ongoing rush of new sites and new pages, any solution --sensible or not--is simply invisible.

Impending emergence of the MMM?

The WWW system has reached a crossroads. Since its inception in 1991, it has evolved rapidly from a tool for congenial information-sharing among CERN's high-energy-particle physicists to a channel of communication for anyone with access to the Internet. Do we really need to link up with pages about someone's goldfish or a Coke-vending machine?

Web-based information, tracked by dozens of Web crawlers and harvesters, continues to grow exponentially without much thought for guidelines, safeguards, and standards concerning the quality, precision, trustworthiness, durability, currency, and authorship of this information. The situation is untenable. Unless serious and energetic remedial steps are taken at once by managers of the most prestigious and resourceful Web sites, and by as many of the organizations dealing with Web and Internet standards as possible, the system currently known as the WWW may come to be known as the MMM (multi-media mediocrity).

Our concerted indolence (or, conversely our concerted actions) will wholly determine whether this most dynamic and most promising part of the Internet will (or will not) [ 2] be seen in the not-too-distant future as (with apologies to William Shakespeare) "a useless shadow, a poor MMM that struts and frets his hour upon the Net, and then is heard no more, a tale told by an idiot, full of digitized sound and multimedia fury, signifying nothing."

Postscript

During the time required to read this article, another 50 Web sites have joined the Net [3].

Acknowledgment

I am indebted to Monika Ciolek for critical comments on the first draft of this article.

Reference

[ 1]. Excerpt from the Creating Net Sites page by the Netscape Communications Co.,
http://home.netscape.com/home/how-to-create web-services.html.

[ 2]. This passage until 31 Apr 2005 read, in a muddled maner: "Our concerted actions will wholly determine whether this most dynamic and most promising part of the Internet will (or will not) ..."

[ 3]. This was true in early January 1996. Four years later, in January 2000, during the time required to read this article, another 500-600 web sites have been placed online (tmc, 11 Mar 2000)

T. Matthew Ciolek, formerly a behavioral scientist, works at the Coombs Computing Unit, Research Schools of Social Sciences and Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. He is the architect and administrator of the Coombspapers, the world's oldest and largest social sciences and humanities FTP site. He also runs the Coombsweb Social Sciences Server as a platform for seven specialist World Wide Web virtual libraries (social sciences, Aboriginal, Asian, Buddhist, demography and population, Pacific, and Tibetan studies). He can be found on the WWW. He can be contacted by e-mail.


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