Empowered creativity through the social web

The web has come a long way since Tim Berners-Lee uploaded the first HTML page in 1991. After decades of static pages filled with one-way content, we’re finally starting to see the benefits and possibilities of a distributed social web.

It feels like there is some sort of creative revolution that has been taking place these last ten years. People are writing blogs, uploading film clips on YouTube, sharing music on SoundCloud and connecting on various social media. And all of this is made on a global scale.

It’s hard to believe that 99 percent of these things were simply not there at all a decade ago. The web is a unique and revolutionary platform for sharing and communication, bringing together the earlier platforms such as radio, television and telephone. Al Gore spoke at SXSW in Austin about the enormous possibilities of internet and I think its importance just cannot be stated enough.

My first cellphone was large as a brick and could only be used as a telephone (doh). Today most people run around with a device in their pocket equipped with more processing power than the computers which placed Armstrong on the moon. That same device is also a portable music player, digital camera, video recorder, web browser, communication device, game station, compass, map, GPS and much more. Some decades ago such a device was considered science fiction.

It’s no wonder that Encyclopedia Britannia recently announced that they will stop publishing their printed edition. A publication that has been proudly present on the book shelves since 1768, the oldest encyclopedia in the English-speaking world.

The iPad and similar devices slightly shifted user focus from creator to consumer, due to lack of a mouse, precision marking, good keyboard and so on. But I hope it won’t make a difference in the long run and that the creative process is here to stay. I guess that people will simply express themselves in different ways.