Still Crazy after All These Years. 60 Years of Hypertext and Counting?

Abstract

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. But the notion of hypertext as a form of non-sequential writing dates back to the early 1960s. Hypertext and hypermedia systems as useful tools for creative thought have almost been forgotten along with several other flavors of pioneering systems. Even the Web went through several stages from a cross-platform information medium, to e-commerce, to Web 2.0, to the mobile Web, to the so-called Social Networks. Today, several trending online platforms are successful despite the fact that they are mobile-only or even app-only without providing decent cross-linking mechanisms to content on other servers. According to business goals it seems to be mandatory to make users spend as much time as possible on their own pages and let them swipe through endless content streams. The keynote will present some of the lost cyberspaces to revive the original motivation for future development. The urgent and complex problems of the world can only be tackled collectively with a powerful, and connected online medium for personal benefit and collective commons.