The World Wide Web is soon going to move decisively off of screens and into the world around us. It is just waiting for one key consumer platform — a well designed wearable. There are strong indications that this platform will be arriving in the next few years.
Which leads to the question: What, essentially, is the Web? I don’t think it is, at heart, a particular set of technologies. Rather it is a powerful idea that is independent of any given technology.
The Web is our shared electronic space. It is where we can all publish and read and look at and listen to information posted by one another. The Web is the world’s bulletin board.
This distinguishes it from, say, Apps, which are meant to serve specific functions. Because the Web is ubiquitous and freely accessible to vast numbers of people, it is essentially a shared place — although not a place in our physical world.
Once the wearables arrive, this “shared place” will start to have more of a presence in our own physical world. It will become accessible as part of our face to face conversations, our navigation through time and physical geography, our very concept of reality itself.
Yes, you will still be able to choose not to use it, just as you can still choose to turn off your SmartPhone (or, for that matter, choose not to talk to other people). But for more and more of the social contract, living life among our fellow humans, we won’t want to turn it off, because its ubiquitous will seep into our very concept of reality itself.
I don’t think that will be a bad thing. Like the screen-based Web of today, the future Web will quickly simply be thought of as normal reality. In fact, people will wonder how on earth anybody managed to get along without it.