A new article by Wired titled “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet” presents the perspective that the World Wide Web has reached it pinnacle and is now on the decline in favor of specialized services that are often closed and proprietary.
This is not a trivial distinction. Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen). The fact that it’s easier for companies to make money on these platforms only cements the trend. Producers and consumers agree: The Web is not the culmination of the digital revolution.
The author goes on to state this effect is due to the inevitable cycle of capitalism.
This was all inevitable. It is the cycle of capitalism. The story of industrial revolutions, after all, is a story of battles over control. A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others. It happens every time.
The article is supported by the following graph produced by CAIDA.
Unfortunately, the interpretation of this data is questionable at best. Are there forces establishing walled gardens and actively tracking your usage and secrets? Of course there are. But what the author interprets as the “Death of the Web”, could simply be a new equilibrium as video establishes itself. The data could also be interpreted as the inevitable spike in usage as video reaches critical mass, before a return to an equilibrium that favors Web usage. Additionally, there is the fact that most video traffic uses the Web as a container.
As Jeremy Scott states in his article “The Web Is Dead, Says Wired – But Video Is Alive And Kicking”, the Web is changing, evolving as it always has and always will.
People are changing the ways they connect to and interact with online content. For our purposes, almost all reputable metrics point to video being on the rise and one of the most dominant forms of online content. Some of our audience members might find that video on YouTube. Some might find it on Facebook. Some might only see it in the apps they apply to their mobile device. If nothing else, the Wired article can serve as a reminder to us of all the many options our intended audience members have to choose from.
It’s crucial for video creators and marketers to understand these trends in technology and content delivery. Because the web is constantly in flux, video producers have to stay up to date on mobile video, apps, HTML5, and more. The web might be dead (it isn’t), but one thing we know for sure: video is alive and well–heck, even Wired agrees with that.
Is the Web dying? No. However, the fact remains that at this point in the information age, the democratization of information is under attack.
