Sir Tim Berners-Lee gives a rare interview
The byline in our state newspaper read:
In a rare interview, the man who created the world wide web – and, 15 years ago this month, gave it away, talks to …
Rare interview? “That’s funny”, I thought, “I’ve recently listened four or five times to an excellent interview with Tim Berners Lee, Sir Tim Berners-Lee talks about the semantic web. It was recorded on 7 February by Paul Miller in his Talking with Talis series. (the four or five times were necessary because my mind usually drifted off when he started talking about things like SPARQL ).
Anyhow, I was eager to read more of the newspaper article. My bullshit radar started twitching when I read that:
The thing that dominates the room…is a computer….It’s an Apple Mac, as far as I can tell, though he will not say…
OK, so the newspaper sent a writer who didn’t know a Mac from a PC. That’s OK, maybe his perspective will be fresh. Fresh it was. Intelligent and knowledgeable it wasn’t.
There was the typical “really smart guy, but he has trouble spelling and looks like he doesn’t read fashion magazines” angle. And the “internet is evil” line.
Last week, Tama Leaver identified three sensationalist anti-internet stories run in the Age newspaper recently,Web 3.0: A Locked Down, “Secured” Web 2.0?. He has often speculated that traditional media run anti-web stories deliberately to scare their advertising base.
He’s some excerpts from the article so you can judge for yourself.
…Sir Tim has no sense of humour as far as I can tell. When, for example, I ask him if he ever wakes up in a cold sweat screaming “My God! I’ve created a monster!”, he blinks, cocks his head to one side and says: “No, Um. No, I don’t”…
…It is no exaggeration to call his invention the most significant since the printing press. But it also has helped gamblers bankrupt themselves, fraudsters prey on the gullible and pornographers sell their virtual wares; and, of course, it has created a sinister new breed of paedophile….
…I ask whether he has heard of the copycat suicides in Wales…
…I ask if he has looked at any porn sites…
…if he had charged royalties as well as asking every user to use the same Uniform Resource Locator (URL) large companies would have dropped his invention. “There was a rival system to mine being worked on called the Goffer”.
ummm..I think you’ll actually find he said Gopher.
…Sir Tim insists it wasn’t altruism on his part, this business of not charging royalties, so much as practicality. But I’m not sure I believe him entirely…
The journalist really saved the best for last, however:
…Sir Tim and his team at MIT also are working on the next stage of the web’s evolution, the semantic web…[I asked whether] Having invented the web and changed the world, did he suffer from difficult “second album” syndrome? He blinks again. Does not smile…
While it’s fun to quote excerpts out of context, if you want to follow up the article and read the whole thing, it was re-syndicated and slightly edited from the Telegraph 30 March 2008,Tim Berners-Lee: a very British boffin
For Tim Berners-Lee’s sake, I hope such interviews continue to be rare. Me? I’ll stick with Paul Miller’s interview.
*Slow clap* Journalists do it again. I could only bring myself to read the first couple of pages of the article – it was about the point that the journalist brought up the copy-cat killer thing that I closed the paper.
I wonder what the angle was? If they were trying to give the regular public an insight in to Sir Berners-Lee, they failed – they jut made him look weird. There was no actual content in the article…
Yeap another padded, very bad hack job. More syndicated clap trap. Lets paint Tim Berners-Lee as the weirdo computer nerd. The journo responsible for the article works for the British Sunday Telegraph.
The article really just shows how much the journo failed to connect with him at all. Telegraph – Next time send someone that understands the topic and can research, not a gossip column hack.
In fact I get the impression for all Tim Berners-Lee politeness the journo was in fact pissing him off with his stupid questions. Seems to be all of say five minutes of an interview if that. Lots in third person which means that something went wrong dramatically. Very bad article.
This perspective makes the hair on the back of my neck rise! Just this weekend on a trip down Interstate 70 from Kansas to Missouri USA I saw a huge billboard that said, “Take Back the Internet! Keep our children SAFE!” When will people that 1. Parents need to be responsible for their children. 2. The Internet does not belong to anyone so how can you take it back? 3. Life is not FAIR.
Sorry, but this attitude always gets me down. Should we take back magazines, because some of them are “dirty” ones? Should we not let children learn to swim or drive as they could drown or crash? With everything new and good, there is always a price. Teaching children about the dangers of the Internet is just as important as teaching them how to drive on ice. The Internet is making the world smaller by bringing people and ideas together – just like this blog! We can express our ideas, learn from others, and keep in touch.
Thanks for listening!
What a painful & embarrassing attempt by the reporter to be savvy and clever. Ouch. Berners-Lee’s courtesy, intellect and classiness came through loud and clear though. Some years ago I saw him speak at a conference in NYC. What I remember so clearly was his soft-spoken manner and his sense of humor, particularly when he apologized for “all that http stuff, you were never meant to see all that” – that was a lovely, funny moment. The Telegraph reporter will be forgotten, Berners-Lee will not.