Sally Jenkinson on 20 years of web evolution

I was nine and living in Jakarta, in Indonesia. It’s been about changing attitudes — recognising the importance of standards, of making things more accessible, open, and easy to use, coupled with our increasing desire to share with others. Apart from reintroducing mixtapes as a method of communication, I definitely wouldn’t swap the technology and web that we have now for those of 20 years ago. The ability to learn everything and anything, and friends. However I think the most important thing for me has been much more subtle. I don’t think it was even hooked up to the phone line. Has it all been improvements, or is there anything we’ve lost along the way? She aims to get people talking and thinking about technology in a creative way, and to use it to enhance experiences. I went to an amazing school where I was able to use computers from around age five, but by age nine we also had a home PC. This has gradually made the internet a much more welcoming place to those who aren’t techies, and has encouraged them to start becoming creators as well as consumers. I don’t think that the internet has directly caused anything to get lost along the way, but I do think that it has helped to facilitate certain pre-existing human behaviour to get worse. What do you hope the web will look like 20 years from now? I really hope that we continue to focus on pushing inclusivity over the next 20 years, and that topics around privacy vs openness, collaboration, accessibility, and standards don’t fall by the wayside. But that doesn’t really matter, because we’ll all be hooked up to the hive mind, working to serve our robot overlords. Sally JenkinsonSally Jenkinson is a technical consultant based in Colchester, UK whose clients have included the BBC, Nokia, EA, Inghams, and the Open Data Institute. What were you doing 20 years ago when net magazine launched? At this point I used the computer mainly for drawing, playing games, and typing stories. What have been the landmark changes for you over the last 20 years? What’s the best things web design has brought the world? Buy the 20th anniversary edition of net magazine today! I hadn’t yet realised that there was a whole world of programming out there, but I had become a bit of a whizz with DOS in the process of loading up games (which I subsequently got worse at over the next 20 years).

Updated: 8 ноября, 2014 — 5:56 пп