Jimmy Wales got me thinking

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia was in Bristol last week and I popped along to see him at the Victoria Rooms at Bristol University.

I’ve been ‘playing’ with the Internet now for 15+ years and remember when Wikipedia arrived so I feel like I have some kind of affinity with the living web rock legend given the timing of Wikipedia’s launch.

Back then the internet wasn’t mainstream and I felt it was treated with mild contempt in traditional marketing and media circles.

Jimmy came along and pioneered the idea of collaborative working online - much in the same way this group plans to share ideas I guess.

A standout moment for me in Jimmy’s talk had to be that he was really “proud” that Google had pulled out of China, just as a proud father would be. This really emphasised that the 600-strong physical audience and 3000+ internet audience really was in the presence of one of the great internet forefathers.

I go to quite a few conferences throughout the year. I see presenters who have made millions, sometimes billions out of the internet yet stood before us was a dreamer, a blue sky-er who had an idea and ran with it. He didn’t have the Google billions/private 737s but he did have an amazing idea that became a reality.

As with so many things that become ubiquitous it is easy to forget someone had to come up with an idea and then run with it. Jimmy did this and has created something only possible in the Internet age.

This talk was part of a huge #wp10 international roadshow Jimmy had been undertaking so the presentation was fairly straightforward but the passion and real love of the Wikipedia community he clearly has really came across.

There were also plenty of subtle undertones to how he spoke. Asked at the Q&A stage what he thought to net neutrality, Jimmy actually identified the advent of closed operating environments such as Apps as being an even bigger threat to the original Utopian dream of open access internet for all.

He cited Apple in particular as being a key ‘pinch’ point within the current app ecosystem. He mentioned how he worried that his children may never experience the thrill of the traditional coding process.

I’d heard similar musings made by Tim Berners-Lee on his talk at the We-Do lectures. It then got me thinking that it could be relevant to this group.

I grew up playing with BC-108 transistor circuit boards, coding in Commodore 64 basic and then BBC Basic – trying to get games published in the geeky computer magazine press (I got one horse racing game that used the randomiser function of the C64 chip published - that was it!). This then evolved into early HTML and so on.

So that begs the question: are the young of today set to miss out on an entire period of creativity because systems have become so highly evolved/dumbed down?

Personally I don’t think they will. As bandwidth (including mobile) and local processing power continue to increase it simply means that what was previously impossible becomes possible.

Much in the same way Brunel’s broad gauge railway, which some have cited as being an early version of electrification (an engine being propelled by a remote energy source), was restricted by medium of steam itself.

Now with Moore’s law onside, bandwidth a plenty (Nielsen’s law!) and mass market adoption of all things digital, the role of a creative technologist really does seem rather exciting. Applications of technology in creative ways after all is nothing new.

What do you think?