³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

Jimmy Ìý Ìý ÌýYou know one of the, one of the most important principles er, for an encyclopaedia is neutrality er, this is the idea that er, Wikipedia itself shouldn't take a stand on any controversial issue. Um, our job is not to be a place for political commentary or persuasion um, but basically just to lay out the, the, the landscape for people.

So if there's a controversial issue, we try to report neutrally on what er, you know relevant and important authorities about it have said. So you know er, pick as an example um, er, a hot button issue like abortion. Wikipedia of course is not going to take a stand on abortion, but it's going to report um, you know that, that the catholic church position is this, and the pope has said that, and critics have responded this way and so on, er, you know the idea is so if you're new to the topic and you want to know what everybody's fussing about, you can come and get that landscape. Of course neutrality's not always easy um, we are human beings and it's a, you know it's, it's serious effort, er, but that's one of the core principles. Er, some of the other principles that are really important are things like reliable sourcing. Now that's something the community has gotten more and more um, interested in over the years, as the project matures, um, people have become less tolerant of just some random information that somebody writes down that they happen to know. Er, and really more looking for what's your source for that um, you know er, is it, do you, do you have a, a scientific journal or a well known newspaper and so on. And in fact we've gotten very sophisticated er, in the community with all of our policies around what counts as a reliable source of contact.

IntervÌý yea can you talk me through that actually because one of the, one of the guiding principles or rather what I've understood to be one of your inspirations for starting Wikipedia is to create an environment that almost breaks down this ivory tower notion that this idea that there is a hierarchy that anybody can contribute knowledge, yet what you're talking about here with this notion of reliable sources, the scientific journal, the peer reviewed, can you talk me through that juxtaposition that sort of, that, that ........ there?

Jimmy I mean it's interesting because um, Wikipedia in many ways does break down a lot of hierarchical assumptions that people have, but that was never the goal, it's not something I particularly care about one way or the other. What I care about is quality. Er, it turns out that it's easier to get quality when you have more people participating and when you judge er, the quality of someone's work on its own merits, rather than er, paying too much attention to their credentials. At the same time we really love when experts come er, we really try to have an environment that's very welcoming of people who know what they're talking about. Um, it's funny because we have this er, reputation for being very er, anti elitist but we're really not anti elitist, we're actually quite snobby within the community er, based on er, you know if you know what you're talking about, and you can back it up, that's honourable and that's really important to us. So our, our concepts about quality er, end up being very um, old fashioned in a certain way um, you know we er, don't regard ourselves as some kind of open free speech forum, where every opinion is as valid as every other opinion. Um, we really want good work, good quality work um, and when we think about what counts as a reliable source, um, it depends very much on the context um, you know if you're, if you're looking at some er, if you want to know what Yasah Arafat said er, you know in 2001 um, the New York Times is a very good source. Um, and er, that's perfectly valid. If you are er, writing some very detailed entry about some concept in physics um, you really want a physics journal. Er, you want some pure review material to back it up, not er, an article in Time Magazine you know um, if you want to write about a TV show then maybe a TV Guide is a good source er, you know, and again if you, you know if you want to write about um, you know er, the, something very scientific or there's something very detailed in history, then you wouldn't use TV Guide as a source. So it depends on the context and the communities er, been very, very thoughtful at really working through er, trying to figure out when is something of a reliable source, for what, and so on and so forth.

IntervÌý It seems that this is something that's evolved over the years?

Jimmy Oh yea I mean in the early days um, we didn't have a lot of policy just because it wasn't necessary. Er, you know when you start and someone is typing er, for the first time you know Africa is a continent and hitting save, and that's our first entry on Africa, you know. It's very simple um, you don't really need a lot of er, detailed er, policy to get started, but then the policy evolves over time, people er, begin to run into controversies er, and then they start to think about how do we resolve this controversy, how can we write Wikipedia so that it's neutral. Um, and one of the best ways is to say well lets, lets reach out to the sources, right let's just report on what the valid sources say. Um, so that's been, yea it's been something that's grown up over a long period of time.

IntervÌý It seems interesting to me that um the, the variation of the number of Wikipedia pages in the different languages, I mean in many ways by creating Wikipedia pages or allowing people to create Wikipedia pages in different languages, you're almost creating those silos that were, you know the web is trying to break down, is that not, how do you make sure that there's cross pollination between those ideas?

Jimmy Right well I mean one of the things that we er, do er, sometimes people ask um, you know do you have a Canadian version of Wikipedia. This is silly right, we have English and er, there are many different varieties of English of course, but they're all together in English Wikipedia. Um, then we have the German and French and so on and so forth, and so now we have over two hundred different languages er, we now have like a hundred and seventy five languages that have a thousand articles which is small you know, but that's still a, a legitimate project that's getting started. ÌýAnd yea we do encourage people er, to make note of what's going on in other languages, but the only people that can do that are people who are bilingual er, who can read in multi languages, and there are people who do that. Now one of the reasons English is the largest er, language is that English is by far the largest language on the internet. And it's the largest second language all around the world. So we see a lot of things like people writing in their, in their native tongue and then they'll also put it into English. So sometimes people will say um, you know and, and there's almost nothing you can do to offend a German Wikipedian more than saying well how many articles have you translated into you know er, you know, so German Wikipedia, so it's a translation of the English. No, no, no it's not, they, they wrote it independently, er, translations are a small part of what people do um, and some people do, they take their time to go and like compare two versions and look for er, interesting er, contradictions er, you know one of the classics um, is um, you know for, well who invented the airplane.

Interv ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýWell I suppose in the western sense it would be the Wright Brothers.

Jimmy The Wright Brothers right, we were all taught, all English speakers are taught this when you're er, you know in second grade, the Wright Brothers invented the airplane, it's a simple and uncontroversial a fact as that you know the moon goes around the earth. Um, in France similarly they are taught, just as uncontroversially that some guy from Brazil who was in France, you know, he invented the plane, and, and in fact the, the true story is actually er, there's some validity to both accounts. And um, you know it's very complicated, you know this is, it's like many inventions, it was part of a spirit of the times and there were a lot of different people doing a lot of different things, um, and who you assign priority to depends on how you define the first flight and so on and so forth. And so it turns out that you know at some point, somebody from French Wikipedia noticed, they said wow what English Wikipedia and French Wikipedia are completely different on this point. And then in the English Wikipedia, people sort of went back and looked at it and er, studied the history more and now the English Wikipedia has a much more nuanced story er, in the history of aviation. ÌýYou know it sort of explains, there are many competing claims and er, here is the different achievements that different people did. And then you get a much richer um, idea, so I think that kind of cross cultural pollination er, is er, really important and really er, valid to help us all move beyond er, second grade.

Interv ÌýÌý Ìý Ìý ÌýÌýWell the danger though is that because there are so many um, English language accounts um, that these are the people who are actually contributing the knowledge that the people who own the knowledge, they're the sort of elites as it were on Wikipedia, because they have this knowledge. And if people first come to the English page, then they're only getting that information from that point of view, without realising that perhaps they themselves could contribute to it.

Jimmy Yea but I mean a lot of people do contribute and particularly for English Wikipedia as I said er, because English is the largest second language around the world, it tends to be very multi cultural. I once was in Lithuania meeting with a, I had a meeting with a head of parliament there, and he's a lovely guy who um, is really into encyclopaedias, he was on the board of a encyclopaedia project there, and when I went in, he had printed out er, some, an entry on a famous battle that happened some hundred years ago between Lithuania and Poland er, and he said um, er, he could read er, English, Lithuanian, Polish and German, he had printed off four. And he said er, that the German version was just quite small, there wasn't much to be said about it, the Lithuanian version was from the Lithuanian perspective, and the Polish version was from the Polish perspective, but then he said the English version was really fabulous and it looked to him like the, the Lithuanians and Poles had come together there to fight about it, and sort of reach some compromise. And then we later went and looked and that's exactly what had happened. Um, and then people, you know from there um, went back er, into the Lithuanian version, the Polish version, and those began to mature over time.

So these kinds of things you know er, English is an interesting language; it's kind of a melting pot language um. But we're really very focused on people writing in their mother tongue. Um, in India for example um, there's been a situation in India for a long time, where um, obviously English is a very important language for the elites in India um, there's you know over twenty different languages in India um, and the, in order to communicate with each other, they could use Hindi, Many people are English as the elites tend to do. And um, what's happening though is that a lot of the people there who er, are on the internet, they're using English a lot but they really have a great passion for their mother tongue, and so now they're beginning you know working in er, you know Canada, Bengali, all of the different languages of India. And those are growing very quickly, so that's something we're very um, excited about.

John Er, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is, is an organisation that exists and has existed since 1990 to try to assure to humanity the right to know. ÌýI mean which is a, a right that hasn't been previously promulgated because it was a, it was an impossibility. ÌýBut our dream is that anybody anywhere may have access to anything that human beings do with their minds one day. ÌýBecause that you know, that capacity is being given us by the internet and that can change everything er, in a lot of interesting ways.

ÌýBut we want to make certain that, that anybody who's got something to say can say it and anybody who wants to listen can hear. ÌýAnd anybody who doesn't want to listen can ting them out and which is an essential part of your freedom of expression is the right not to, not to listen. Um, and we believe that that can, that can be conveyed by making certain that the architecture of the internet er, is designed in such a fashion so as to be both ubiquitous and, and open.

Intv What are the threats?

John Well the powers that have been of course. ÌýI mean there are a lot of er, you know, outside of, outside of er, raw weaponised force the principle way in which power exerts itself is by creating reality distortion fields around the control of information. ÌýYou know, you don't have to control people much if you can tell, if, if you can control what they believe. ÌýAnd you can control what they believe if you control what they have access to. ÌýIf you can control what they can know the rest of it is a very simple matter.

John The threats to, to the right to know are, are er, are the usual powers that have been who would rather that you didn't know certain things because that's how they control people. ÌýEr, you know, I mean er, that's why for example when the, when Martin Luther er, came along it wasn't just that he nailed some thesis to the door, it was that he came along about the same time as Gutenberg who could give everybody a bible. And suddenly the bible was not something that was, was strictly interpreted by the church you know, ex cathedra, the bible was something that anybody could read and figure out for himself. You know, that, and that changed fundamentally changed the power of the church. ÌýAnd changed the power of all, all social organisation in Europe. ÌýEr, and we just think you know, the human mind has its limitations but we just think that, that humans are more likely to achieve their ultimate purpose whatever that may be if they have the capacity to completely explore the possibility space of what can be known. Er, you know, and I have a, a mystical belief in this and, and, and, and EFF does as well. We want people to have, I mean I'm pro choice, but you can't make a choice unless you have some... I mean all good choices are informed. ÌýNow I, I would grant, I mean I can imagine there are people listening to me say that and, and say well yeah what about all these, what about the new reality distortion fields that, that spin themselves up in the rumour mill of the internet where you get you know, like people who, who are going around claiming that Obama's a Muslim or that he's, he wasn't born in America or you know, any, any number of silly things that get spread around. And, and you know that happens. ÌýBut I, I ultimately think that in a completely open information environment the truth will out.

Intv But at the same time the, the distortion fields are... in order to cope with all that information we seek those things that confirm. ÌýI mean the internet is criticised for its confirmation bias...

John Well sure no, no, no but look I mean what do you think mass media are about? ÌýMass media exist to confirm the, the pre existing beliefs of the masses. ÌýYou're, you're working in one. ÌýI mean how easy is it for you to get a programme, programme on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ that says true things to people that they don't already believe? ÌýYou know, I think you'd have a hard time.

Intv So is the objective to lay it out there and let people find out...

John I just you know, I want it, I want, I want there to be an open smorgasbord and you know, that anybody can, anybody can roam at and, and, and EFF has been, I think remarkably successful in, in maintaining this. ÌýThe, the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an organisation and as a er, you know, as a, a kind of mission that a lot of people just decided to adhere to whether they were members or not, has I think, has been you know, if I died today I would still feel like I did something useful.

Intv At its core it feels as if the, the ownership of ideas is part of what you're fighting for?

John Well see that's, that's, you know, and this is the real, see you can't own free speech. ÌýAnd you know, I, I saw this very early and you know, this was a, actually not an EFF issue, it was something that I identified er, I, I wrote a piece for Wired Magazine in, in '93 which they called The Economy of Ideas. ÌýAnd I recognised that the only reason that copyright had worked was because it was hard to make a book. ÌýAnd that suddenly anything that a human being could do with his or her mind would be infinitely reproducible at zero cost and infinitely distributable. And given that there is a fundamental quality in human nature that likes to share information. ÌýI mean if you think something is, is cool or interesting what's the first thing you want to do with it? ÌýTell everybody you like. ÌýYou know, and if, and if it's not just simply saying I read this great book you should go out and buy it but you can just sort of zap the book right in to the other persons mind practically, you're gong to do that. And you're not going to have much regard for, for copyright. Ìý Er, and so the powers that had been suddenly saw copyright as being a splendid way to control this scary new liberty. ÌýEr, that exerting powerful controls on owned word would be the, would be the real method of clamping down on this, this thing. ÌýYou know, so that, I, I knew was going to be where the push really finally came to shove. ÌýEr, and they, they had a pretty good, good run there at least legally and legislatively. ÌýYou know, they, they managed to win every place where there was an established power. But where they didn't win was where it really counted which is that you know, they were trying to set up technical obstacles to the free flow of information er, usually involving cryptography or something like that and you got a bunch of you know, 55 year old greed heads that are up against you know, 17 year old electronic Hezbollah that they have seriously pissed off by their previous depredations on that community.

These rushes sequences are part of our promise to release content from most of our interviews and some general footage, all under a permissive licence for you to embed or download and re-edit.

This is one of several general 'talking head' interviews that were filmed on September 15th. The interviewer was Series Producer Russell Barnes.

Transcript:

You may have noticed that our website refers to the production as 'Digital Revolution (working title)'. This is because we have yet to decide upon a name for the series that will go out on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Two in early 2010.

Please give us your suggestions for the series title as comments below (or via Twitter to using the hash tag #bbcnamestorm) and we'll add them to our list for consideration. We'll regularly update you on the current front runners and favourites to help keep the process moving.

Clickstream

Generation Web

Clip 1

Click here if you want to embed or download this rushes sequence.

Clip 2

Click here if you want to embed or download this rushes sequence.

Transcript of Clip 1

Intv: Do you think that generations growing up, the new generation growing up with the web, think differently from other generations?

Tim Berners-Lee: Well it's clear that even people who have, like me, who started off without the web and now use it, work differently. When we want to think of something we tend to often just reach for the keyboard, because we have assumed that we can find stuff. Now people say, I don't know, but the people that-, they've measured that people are not remembering so much. I don't know, but I know that the way I work very often assumes that I can go for my computer helper, for my web, as a helper,
the web is an extension of my brain er when I'm roaming. So my little interface to the web is too expensive to use, I feel as though suddenly I've got one hand tied behind my back, because the usual sort of instinctive reaction to whip it out, I have to hold back and try
to actually think things out.

Intv: Do you think social networking is irrevocably changing our relationships, one with another? That that is almost a logical progression from what the web is about, in a way? That it's about connecting and this is actually going to change human relationships?

Tim Berners-Lee: I think the web's about a lot of things. The web is about, you know, it's connecting humanity, alright, the web is humanity connected. That includes a lot of things, and friends is one of them. I think the social networking systems we have at the moment are, in a way, in their infancy. Typically they allow you to
deal with the concept of a friend, and a photograph, and whether a friend is in a photo, and where I'm going, but in fact my life is much more complex than just having a set of friends. I have all kinds of groups er I want to share different things with er different people. I want to go through different sorts of social protocols that you might
do on the web, like figuring out where to meet, I will do with business colleagues. And figuring out whether er what sort of film would be good for me to watch, I will do with my friends perhaps. There are all kinds of different things that I do in different cases. I think that we'll end up with much more complicated things, don't know whether we'd still call them social networking, but our interactions, as we interact through the web, I think will include more and more things called social machines. Things where
er just like booking a meeting room er or organising a trip, or building a photograph album er or, for that matter, reviewing a scientific paper and deciding which one should be published. Things where people are doing the work, but the machinery of the web is allowing them to work, is actually doing the administration of linking together into a bigger machine.

Intv: As we look at things like climate change and sort of big challenges, do you think the web is, in its ability to share knowledge and find answers through sharing knowledge, is going to be one of the great ways in which we can combat, you know, these big problems facing humanity?

Tim Berners-Lee: I don't think it's going to be sufficient, but I think it's going to be essential. I think for these huge problems that we have in medical fields, trying to understand the brain, understand Alzheimer's, understand cancer er the huge problem of understanding the planet. Here we have this planet, we know it's in trouble, we know it's sick. We really have got so much information about it we have to put together, we have to understand it, we have to then model it, understand how it will change, what things we do will do to it in a long term. So,
yes, that's a huge amount of information, it's a huge amount of data. It's also a huge amount of stuff in people's heads that they may not have put down. Ideas that they might have about how things interact. I think we're going to need the power of networking all that data together into a web of data, certainly, in order to be able
to solve those problems.

Intv: Talk to me a bit about the semantic web then, what is the ability, in essence, what is the semantic web, or the link data web, and what is its potential?

Tim Berners-Lee: Simply that the web of link data is the web which has got on it all the things on your computer which are data rather than documents. So a document is something, you write a letter to your friend, but your calendar is data. So, different thing about data, when you look at the calendar data you don't read the data itself, you look at a day view or you look at a week view, or month view, you can take all the calendars of your friends and smoosh them together so that you've got them on the same day. You can ask the
calendar to work things out, like when will all your friends be available to go and have lunch. You can put onto the calendar information which is-, other information which is public. All kinds of things er when groups are playing near you, football. When you're doing that, you are taking
data together and you're manipulating it, and you're looking at it from different views. That's the sort of thing you can do with
data. Now, most of the data which is out there on the web isn't there so you can do things with it. I can't pull it into calendar, I can't pull it into a spreadsheet. I can't look at it on a timeline. If I'm a geneticist I can't look at it using the tools that geneticists use to look at genetic material, because it's been published in a paper. It's there as a pdf file, so I can print it, but I can't do things with it, I
can't analyse it. So I think it's a big frustration to scientists, but it's a big frustration also to business people who want to plan their days. In fact it turns out that when you look at all the different sorts of data there's a huge amount of it, and what's really valuable is the way it connects together. So it's not just that I want to look at a particular meeting, it's that I want to look at the person who's organising it and I want to look at-, I want to go to the information about the
organisation that they're running, and I want to find out what's its market cap, where is it, where is it invested? Or in which countries is it invested, which sorts of government do they have? Let's look at that government, when was it elected, who runs it? Where did he come from, where did he go to school, what sort of a school is it?
Now, just as you're surfing the web, you can surf through all the data, but the difference with data is that when you've found an interesting pattern, like oh, I found that somebody-, I found that all the members of the board went to the same school. The web of data it'll show me all the companies I'm dealing with, where all the members of the board went to the same school. It's a query to a database,
just looking at all the data out there, if it were available I'd be able to ask all kinds of questions which nobody had asked before, and getting answers back in a very much more powerful way. So, the link data web is in a way more powerful than the web when it comes to being analysed and re-used.

Intv: What's the spirit of the web?

Tim Berners-Lee: The spirit of the web. The spirit of the web, the beginning, was of people working as it were under the bed [clothes] with the light on. People working after the other people had gone home, and installing a web server and setting an email saying 'Oh, by the way, at the end of the work day I installed this web server, I put some photographs on it, hope you like it.' Or 'I put up all our documentation in the web form, just in case you're interested
in it.' Er most of these people did it because they thought it was a good idea at the time, and of course we do lots of things because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and a lot of them turn out to be a terrible idea a bit later. So it's worth celebrating the ones where actually it was a good idea, I think. So the spirit is partly if-,
if everybody did this, this will be really cool, and there's some people who will, when there's something like that, that if everybody did it, it will be really cool, they'll do it. So those people are the people who kick off these network-based things. But things which are networks, which are where everything's connected, like the telephones. As Bob [Macroff] pointed out that, when you sell the first
telephone it's difficult because you can't phone anybody with it. The value of one piece depends on how much else there is there. So people looked at the web and thought, 'Oo, if there was a lot of global hypertext out there it'll be really neat, so I will put some out there anyway.' And right now with data it's the same thing, people are saying, 'Well, there's not a huge
amount of data out there, but the bit that's out there is really neat, and if there was lots out there it will be great, so I'm going to put my bit out there.'

Intv: Do you think the web says something very positive about human nature?

Tim Berners-Lee: The human nature that I came across from the work from the early web developers, it was very open, very giving, people very much working together, encouraging each other. Very much full of excitement, getting a kick out of making things work, and very much out of making things work together. I think the collaborative spirit of it was a driver for most of the people, even though they worked by themselves sometimes, because the nearest sort of web enthusiast may have been hundreds of miles away er they were connected up over the network. And I think the fact that they were
connected up through email lists initially and of course the early websites um I think probably was a very important part of it.

Intv: Do you feel that the web is really a reflection of who we are?

Tim Berners-Lee: From the technical point of view the web is supposed to be a blank sheet of paper. The web itself is not supposed to predispose anybody to use it for one particular subject or for one particular type of material. It's not suppose to really-, it doesn't predispose even to do good stuff. You can put up a bad website, or page, or terrible, or brilliant web page. It's just like the white piece of paper. So when we look out there and we see what a lot of
wonderful stuff there is and what a lot of junk there is, yes, we have ourselves to blame, this is humanity, this is how humanity is. There's lots of wonderful stuff andÌý a lot of junk happening, some of the junk aspiring to be wonderful stuff. Um often the question of what's wonderful and what's junk is clearly
defined by science. Sometimes, often, what's wonderful and what's not is extremely subjective when it comes to music and art. So, when you look out there we've got only ourselves to blame for what's out there. If you look out there and you think that there's an area of the web where really it could be a lot better, well, go and make it better. Go and make a better website. Go and write a better essay. Go and make some better sets of links to more
useful material. It's always put the challenge out there. So when somebody complains about it I point out two things; you don't have to read the junk, you can restrict yourself to reading the things that you like, and you can always contribute. So I think it's really important, the technology of the
web, and the way the web is run by society allows people to go out and contribute, and to go fix it and make it better.

Transcript of Clip 2

Intv: How would you [characterise] the effect of the web on nation states? You know, western democracies on one hand, but then authoritarian regimes like China and perhaps Iran on another?

TimWell the web naturally, as a technology, tends to lead to openness. It makes openness easy and closedness more difficult. So one of the nice things has been where we've seen that countries that tend to be rather closed and where information flow was not very good, have used the internet in fact, to open up. It's unfortunate when we find a
country where there has been a very strong clampdown. My feeling is that there is, maybe independent of the internet, an inexorable movement
towards openness. That as people learn more about other countries, as people learn more about the world, then they demand more. They connect more and they push back against the borders. And once you've allowed
openness it's very difficult to push it back. So I hope that there will be a general move towards openness and each country bit by bit will become open and-, when it comes to information, and therefore become
a better base for an informed electorate and an informed democracy.

Intv: When you were developing the web, did you think about, I suppose, this idea-, it is fundamentally a globalising force, a trans-national force. It allows communities, or people, to connect across borders. Countries aren't on the web, individuals are, and individual websites and communities are built from those websites. Is that something that you were intrigued by when you were thinking about the web and developing it?

TimCertainly the fact that the web breaks down those geographical boundaries is really interesting, and it's not clear that the effect of that has at all, really, come to er come to full fruition. We've seen, yes, people will chat to people in other countries er they find it difficult to do that across
time zones maybe, but you get-, certainly there are strong
communities which are international. But still, a lot of things are still geographical. Now imagine that you are part of a town, you're in a
school, you're in a town, you're er in a region and you're in a country and you're in a continent. Now imagine though that everybody picked those randomly, they would be in one continent, they would deal with affairs of a different continent, and a country which was not in that continent, and they would deal with another region which was not in either of those, and a town which was not in any of those and then they would go to a school which was not in any of the above. Can you
imagine then they'd have a very different view of the world er and we don't have anything like that amount of sort of twistedness about the way we connect. So we've got the ability to connect to people in the world, just as, you know, a town has got the ability to twin with another town. But it takes a lot of energy. Maybe it takes um the brain learning
how to do it, I don't know. Maybe it's something which people are really not that much suited for. They find it exciting to have a certain amount of contact outside the local area, but also, they're comfortable with people that they meet locally and, in fact, to a certain extent, they find life easier when all their circles of interest are nicely nested one
inside each other, with home in the middle.

Intv: Do you think censorship is ever justified? Web censorship.

TimDo I think web censor-, I think that there are always illegal-, there are things which are illegal, like child pornography, incitement to violence, there are things which our society has decided should be made illegal, and those are illegal whether they happen on the web or not. So when those-, when that sort of thing happens, then I think it's reasonable for authorities to take
force, to use force to stop people doing things, to block information which is really er which has crossed that boundary, which has crossed the boundary into the criminal. Society continually reviews, using the existing systems er reviews that boundary between what is just horrible but stuff that we tolerate er for free speech, and stuff where we draw the line and we say no. Free speech or no free speech, that is too horrible to allow, or it's too
dangerous to allow. We continually have to adjust that boundary.ÌýÌýÌý

Intv: Are you worried that sometimes the web sometimes allows cranks to speak under [pranks] in a sense in which it can balkanise communities as well as bring people together? Is that something that has bothered you as you've watched the web develop?

Tim Berneres-Lee: Well there are these two concerns, and they're really opposite, and they're both [strongly] strongly expressed. So one of them is the balkanisation problem. Isn't it true that people who belong to a particular cult can set up their email so that they can only get email from other people in the cult, and when they go to a website the website only links to other websites which believe the strange things that these people behave? And don't you then get people who end up sitting just by their computers,
communicating in such a way that when they meet-, they come out of the cellar and meet somebody in the street, the only thing in common with them is-, they have nothing in common, the only way they can communicate with them is to shoot
them? No, that is one vision of a horrible cultural pothole. Then the other frightening vision is, isn't it true that once everybody can communicate with everything, then everybody will end up just going to the same website? Won't everybody just go to this great, big McDonald's culture, which will hand us out the music we'll all watch and the art we'll all appreciate, and the language which we'll all start speaking, which will lose a huge number of long words and it'll become very simple? Won't we all-, when all the teams of the world end up speaking the same language over
the internet and end up growing up to be adults who have actually no culture at all? So that is the extreme of the mono-culture, the fright that we'll all just be one bland very, very broad culture and then the contrast, of course, with the worry that we're going to be a bunch of very narrow ones. Now, I think, in fact, the wonderful thing is that people naturally avoid those very much. If you find yourself in
too bland a culture you go and spend some time with a smaller group. If you spend too much time in a small group, oo, you get out and do something and, you know, and read a newspaper about the world. So, and in fact of course we're involved in all kinds of things at a national level, the city level, in groups and schools and so on. So in fact, all these different scales, or different size of community which we're involved in, I think people naturally need to be involved in
different scales. They need to spend some time by themselves, sometime worrying about the planet, but also of everything in between, because people have that natural tendency to get involved in lots of different communities. So, they tie individual communities together. You've heard of act locally, think globally? Well, there's also act globally, think locally. There's act nationally, think globally. There's
all these combinations, and because people are doing that, they're acting in one domain but they're thinking about another size of community while they're doing it, because of this overlap, I think people naturally steer us away from each of these horrible extremes, toward a big tangled up, very complex but wonderful mess of entangled humanity.