Why are the intertubes like a catflap?
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A couple of weeks ago my Dad and I were on our way to visit my Grandma, who’s moved into a retirement village down at Torquay. As we were driving through Geelong, I thought I’d see whether Dad had caught any of the buzz about this web2.0 thing all the kids seem to be into these days.
Turns out he knows about blogs, wikis, and Google Maps, and has heard of YouTube and MySpace though he hasn’t visited either. I was pretty impressed; Dad hasn’t really understood the technologies I’ve been using since I was in secondary school.
And so, emboldened, I started to talk about mashups, APIs, RSS feeds, and more. I tried to explain how people can take the photos off Flickr, cross-reference them geographically against Google Maps, and come up with Flickrvision. Or that people can aggregate content and embed rich media from all around the place into other websites, without having to painstakingly collaborate with the content providers at the other end on a case-by-case basis.
“Oh,” said Dad, “that sounds pretty obvious to me. I’m surprised you think it’s newsworthy.”
That’s when my jaw hit the floor. The man who’d been completely bemused by email a few years ago was now claiming that Flickrvision was the obvious and inevitable outcome of this whole “Internet thing”. The guy who’d made me explain again and again how anyone could ever make money off free software now considers it a matter of course that there should be open APIs all over the place.
I’ve been thinking about this for weeks now, and all I can come up with is: “That’s easy for you to say, you smug bastard.” If it were really that easy to come up with this stuff, Dad wouldn’t have been shuffling punch cards in blissful oblivion for Big Blue while Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart were inventing Hypertext and the people at Xerox PARC were coming up with computer networks and GUIs; he’d be a billionaire by now.
Or, as Douglas Adams put it in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency:
“St Cedd’s,” [Dirk Gently] pronounced, “the college of Coleridge, and the college of Sir Isaac Newton, renowned inventor of the milled-edge coin and the catflap.”
“The what?” said Richard.
“The catflap! A device of the utmost cunning, perspicuity and invention. It is a door within a door, you see, a …”
“Yes,” said Richard, “there was also the small matter of gravity.”
“Gravity,” said Dirk with a slightly dismissive shrug, “yes, there was that as well, I suppose. Though that, of course, was merely a discovery. It was there to be discovered.” He took a penny out of his pocket and tossed it casually onto the pebbles that ran alongside the paved pathway.
“You see?” he said. “They even keep it on at weekends. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later. But the catflap… ah, there is a very different matter. Invention, pure creative invention.”
“I would have thought it was quite obvious. Anyone could have thought of it.”
“Ah,” said Dirk, “it is a rare mind indeed that can render the hitherto nonexistant blindingly obvious. The cry ‘I could have thought of that’ is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn’t, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.”
And that is why the intertubes are like a catflap.
Incidentally, if Wikipedia is to be believed — and why not, since it’s supposed to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica on scientific matters, though whether Isaac Newton’s invention counts as such is anyone’s guess — Sir Isaac did invent the catflap. He did not, however, attend the fictional St Cedd’s College, Cambridge; he was at Trinity.
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