Exploring the Future #5

Bernard Stiegler is a director of IRI (Innovation and Research Institute) at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmith College in London and a professor at the University of Technology of Compiègne where he teaches philosophy.

The Web and you, what's the story

" I started working on the Web as such around 1994, when the Nord-Pas-de-Calais French region and the European Commission asked me to write a report on the information society. However, one could say that my interest for Web issues started before the Web itself: in 1989, with Alain Giffard, we created a working group devoted to the challenges of digital reading and collaborative annotations within an association which prefigured what was to become the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library). The goal was then to build a network of annotators' communities connected through workstations we called Computer Aided Reading Stations (SGML based as Web standards did not exist at the time). This project gave me the opportunity to think practically and theoretically on what we call today Social Web and Semantic Web, i.e. a collaborative indexation in one hand, and bots assisting the readers on the other hand. Unfortunate political changes stopped these promising early works."

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