Looking Back: Entering the Web

The Web has been both a subject and a research tool in my work since 1992. I’ll never forget the day when I entered its amazing frontier. I was editor of a computer newsletter read by NASA Lewis Research Center’s scientists and engineers (but probably more importantly by administrators who controlled the budget). I stopped to visit Fred Goldberg, my best source on networking, and boy did he have a scoop. He showed me this new way to communicate that had been developed by a guy in Cern, Switzerland. There were probably less than a dozen sites up at that time, and we visited them all. Over the next few months, I wrote about it and hung out with the computer geeks who were using it (I guess it’s OK to call them “geeks” now but they would have been offended then.)

At the time, I was working on a Master of Arts in journalism and mass communications at Kent State University and this was right around the time when I needed to propose my Master’s project. I decided to look at how journalists and media organizations would be affected by electronic technology advances such as the “new World-Wide Web” (which was so unfamiliar to my audience that I had to define it, believe it or not). I did lots of research on media control and ownership, gatekeeping, ethics, and other areas. There wasn’t much written yet on what was becoming known as “new media.” I did a lot of speculating too and proposed many theories about effects that later came to be. The visionary portion of my paper was published as part of a 1993 NASA symposium on emerging computing and communications technologies (not online but can be ordered from NASA). This was probably one time when my “creative generalist” tendencies failed me. After completing the work and graduating in 1993, I moved into new areas of interest instead of immersing myself a little further in writing about new journalism media.

That new area was education. After deciding to start an independent writing practice, my first project was writing a technology vision for Ohio’s Technology in Education Steering Committee. I’ve worked on some other state initiatives related to technology in education since then, but I also branched out into other areas. Hence (and I’m not complaining, just stating a fact), I no longer work at the frontiers of technology. I try to visit there whenever possible (and should do so more often) but I’m no longer what you would call an early adopter.