Web 3.0 Lab Statement of Purpose

Photo by Gail Orenstein

Our worlds have always been constructed of information, we live as the product of the flow of information to our brain.  In the past five years there has been a revolution in when, where and how this information comes to us, leading to a flood of constant knowledge coming in to our minds.

Our imaginations have not had time to catch up.

The Web 3.0 Lab is a project joining researchers, artists, and designer seeking to help our imagination and understanding to catch up with our new reality.

Our area of research extend beyond just technology, mobility and social networks to cover politics, sociology, geography, art, and architecture.  Any area where the web touches the real world is an area of our interest.

The most dramatic change of communication in recent human history has been the availability of the mobile Internet.  This has combined the greatest and most powerful communication and information storage in the world connected to us in devices as intimate as our own clothing.

Photo by Gail Orenstein

Just 10 years ago it was not possible for someone sitting with Internet access to discover the lists of all World Cup winner nations, a full list of UK Prime Ministers and their parties, or the IMF data on unemployment for most nations on the world for the past 30 years.

The impacts of these are both common day and  yet still impossible to fully imagine, in fact we are presently living so far in to the future that it is hard for us to imagine the reality of our everyday life.  We are living in a time when it takes the skills of a science fiction writer to follow our own movements through the global Internet.

Photo by Gail Orenstein

Today there is not reason to forget almost any fact, in seconds from anywhere the entire record of science, mathematics, art, history, politics are available from anywhere.   We live in a world where ignorance, forgetfulness, and disconnection is becoming obsolete.

Today it is becoming necessary to explain to the young what is meant by losing contact with someone, of never being able to check a fact.  

Our everyday life has been radically expanded out, we can now move about the world keeping in tough with the world store of data, the wisdom of the entire species, our entire cluster of friends and contacts, and a record of your experiences at our finger print.  

Clearly we don’t even understand our current situation, we can’t even imagine the world we are actually living in.

Map showing tweets in San Francisco during a major Occupy Protest

The Web 3.0 Lab seeks to develop the tools, technical tools but tools of though and tools of creative activity, that enable us to see the world we actually live in.