What the web doesn't do...

I recently had a conversation with a copyright lawyer who works as the general secretary of the society of authors (UK). While we were talking, I was surprised to learn that paper books were not likely to die out any time soon due to the rise of the eBook. Most people still enjoy paper books despite all their faults, just because it's something physically there - not ones and zeroes on a hard drive.

This was perhaps the most striking reminder I've had in a long time of how limitted technology will always be. But of course, now I think about it, there are many things the web doesn't do. I can't pass an object to someone I'm talking to on IM. I can't exercise. I can't make a paper aeroplane. I can't lie on a beach.

In other words, I can't do anything physical.

It's important to note the distinction between what the web doesn't do yet but could be possible in future - for example, write a full sized program based on a brief and a GUI guideline - and what the web will never do. The cloud is completely virtual - it only does information, not real objects.

My sister is paranoid about technology - she looks at virtual letters (emails), conversations (IM), debates (web fora), newspapers, lectures, maps, calendars, shops, dictionaries, books and notepads, and wonders where it will stop. I paraphrase, but she tells me that 'soon we'll be virtual people, eating virtual food, having virtual sex to make virtual babies, sending them to virtual schools and we'll forget what life's like". My recent chat with the copyright lawyer reminded me just how untrue that is.

But as I say, the internet is not about physical things - it's about information. In fact, most of it is about ideas. Collaborating on documents. Arguing on fora and IM. Demonstrations on video sites. Research on search engines. Publishing on blogs. The cloud provides a perfect medium for thinking. It will never be a way to live our lives, because it's not designed for living. BUT it will be - and to an extent already is - a way to think, because when you take away all the lines of html, the javascript, the css, browsers, DNS, servers and broadband, it's a way to get a string of 1s and 0s - an idea - between A and B - two people - before they can say quidditch.