4WWW95: opening plenary session


welcome address:

the conference was officially opened by albert vezza from the MIT-laboratory for computer science, who was one of the two conference co-chairs.
unfortunately, tim berners-lee, the director of the WWW consortium and member of the program committee got stuck in the snow storm and he missed the opening session ...

keynote address:

the keynote address was given by bran ferren, imagineering, vice president of the Disney corporation. his talk was titled "there's no bits like show bits".

he introduced the most advanced interactive system in the world: the human being. then he stated: "if the audience in this room growth like the Web, there will be 400'000 attendees at the end of my talk" (there were about 2'000 when he started ...).

because the main theme of the conference was called "the Web revolution", bran looked back in the history of mankind and listed the points of revolution:

  1. the invention of the human language(s)
  2. the invention of printing
  3. the invention of radio

all these inventions improved the means to tell stories. now with the Web, anybody can become a publisher and tell stories.

bran predicted that newspapers will be banned in about 20 years, because they are a waste of resources. but books will last for ever, because they are very advanced devices with the following properties:

then he introduced the term "motional resolution" in contrast to technical resolution. high technical resolution does not help, if there is no "motional resolution" and "motional resolution" does NOT require any high tech resolution at all !

bran encouraged to use the Web for story telling, to use it to educate our children, to open their hearts, to open their minds and to teach them well !

finally he said, with the Web, the power will shift from television station to people, because now everybody can distribute information (stories) to a world wide audience.


back to 4WWW95 main document.
4WWW95 opening session / 08-jan-96 (ra) / reto ambühler
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