Web

After being created as a text-only destination nearly twenty years ago, the Web has increasingly become a visual destination, where images, photos and videos have replaced text as the new lingua franca of online influencers. In the evolutionary development from blogs to Facebook to Tumblr and now to Pinterest, there has been a steady shift toward more images and less text, as well as easier, one-click ways to share this visual content with everyone else on the Internet.

The latest great announcement by Steve Jobs, eagerly awaited by the Apple faithful, was not a shiny new product like the next iPhone or iPad – it was something much more profound. As part of a keynote speech delivered this week at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in downtown San Francisco, Jobs promised nothing less than to kill the Web.

The same people who brought you Wikileaks are back, and this time, they've created a virtual currency called Bitcoin that could destabilize the entire global financial system. Bitcoin is an open-source virtual currency generated by a computer algorithm that is completely beyond the reach of financial intermediaries, central banks and national tax collectors.

The technology world is all about tipping points, and last month marked the first time ever that a mobile phone (the iPhone 4) became the most popular camera on the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. The change speaks to a broader cultural zeitgeist, in which the ability to transmit images instantaneously to your online social network is valued far more highly than image quality.

We are living in an unprecedented era in which personal data about our digital identity, our online activity, our financial dealings, our geo-location and even our Social Graph – is widely available across the Web. If you think about the amount of data that you create on a daily basis – and the amount that can be tracked and recorded – the figure is truly staggering.

Whether consciously or not, most of us subscribe to a PC-centric view of the Internet, in which everything revolves around content that is created or accessed via a PC or Mac. However, that is about to change as mobile increasingly becomes the new paradigm for both creating and consuming content. Quite simply, the Web is about to experience a Copernican moment.

We've entered a new era of conspicuous Web consumption, where people are encouraged to demonstrate their social status online by contributing to an increasingly unwieldy number of social media, social networking and location-based services. It's hard to pinpoint the exact date, but the Web has arguably become a different kind of place than it used to be just a few years ago - a place where attaining and then maintaining social status has become a giant game -- a sort of digital Keeping Up With the Kardashians. What it could mean for the future of the Web is that only those technologies that are capable of perpetuating the social status of the Internet elite will be allowed to prosper and succeed.

It's almost a cliche these days to say that the Web is accelerating the move toward an attention-deficit disorder literary culture that celebrates the 140-character tweet but has a hard time digesting the 140-page book. We're constantly reminded that the Web is somehow making us stupid, but I'm starting to wonder if the next iteration of the Web - helped along by the explosion of new content experiences made possible by the iPad and the innovative programming capabilities of HTML5 - could actually lead to a backlash of sorts against short-form content culture and a renewed celebration of deep, experiential content.