NEW YORK - Maya Lin, the architect who designed the starkly resonant Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, once said that she wanted to "create spaces for people to think without telling them what to think."
The same could be said of Marc Weiss, creator of the Web Lab and its Web Development Fund. By nurturing the evolution of independent film culture in the early 1970s, Weiss helped loosen Hollywood's monopolistic grip on the moving image. By launching the Emmy-winning P.O.V. series on public television, Weiss opened up the one-to-many medium to the diverse perspectives of dozens of independent documentary filmmakers.
With the 1995 launch of P.O.V. Interactive, Weiss ported his passion for creating spaces for people to think to the Net. Now, the Web Development Fund is giving others the wherewithal to develop ambitious projects to make the many-to-many medium even more of a spur for the development of new social networks.
The fund's first round of support was announced this week, with more than US$150,000 in seed money going to nine promising projects. Hot New York-based design firms Funny Garbage and I/O 360 will create an online gallery of Cold War culture called the Dark Museum, launching in the fall. A site called Working Stiff will give just-folks a place to schmooze and share online diaries of their 9-to-5 travails. Cataclysm: Glimpses of the End of the World will be a piece of interactive theater that explores fin-de-millennium fears.
A whimsical site called Convince Your Computer You're Human will turn the Turing test for artificial intelligence on its anthropocentric head, and a Philadelphia-based project called the Teen Screen will give inner-city kids the tools and training they need to become programmers. Other projects will take a deep look at adoption, encourage challenging dialogues about the state of Central America, and give those whose loved ones have committed suicide a place to break out of isolation and find ways to grow beyond their grief.
The kinds of projects the fund is looking to support, says Weiss, are those that encourage people to "develop new kinds of relationships, to interact with each other in new ways that help them understand their place in the world and how they can have a greater impact."
By giving the creators of those sites the tools to interact with one another and share the insights of their experience with the Web developer community at large, the Web Lab hopes to "build a community of practice," Weiss says, drawing a parallel between the state of Web culture now and that of independent filmmaking 20 years ago.
"People are doing great work, but it's isolated and fragmented. There's not a lot of coordination and sharing of ideas," he says. "We want to provide not only funding, but visibility for this kind of work."
Weiss notes that one significant difference between the nascent online culture and the indie film ferment of the '70s is that there are less "bright-line barriers" between commercial and noncommercial work.
"Then, we thought of ourselves as in opposition to mainstream media," he recalls. "The Web is different. People who are looking for a business model know how important the experimental work is, and the sites that really see the social potential of the Web and are doing top-quality work -- like FEED -- are doing their work in a commercial context with no loss of integrity."
Weiss takes a dim view, however, of many of the attempts to hybridize online and offline media by creating facile spin-offs of broadcast programming, calling them "akin to fan magazines."
"I was in broadcasting for 10 years, but a lot of people who come from broadcasting have very blindered perspectives. To them, the Net is the old medium with a new distribution system," he charges. "Like video on demand. Great, put Seinfeld online, and I don't have to watch it at X-o'clock. A lot of the TV Web sites are just encouraging people to be superficial -- to talk about hairstyles rather than ideas. It's the worst possible use of the medium."
With P.O.V. Interactive, Weiss built a venue that encourages substantive online dialogues even where the broadcasts themselves are barely mentioned. When P.O.V. aired Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision in 1996, P.O.V. Interactive launched a site called Re: Vietnam -- Stories Since the War that became a place where veterans, survivors, and people too young to know what the war meant to American society shared perspectives.
"In the 25 years since the war had ended, I'd never had a conversation with someone who had supported the war," Weiss admits. "I'm not sure I could have done it sitting in a room. A lot of people talk about the Internet as an ideal place to build community among like-minded people. We found a way to use it to build bridges so that people could talk across their differences."
There are two strings attached to the support from the development fund, which Weiss prefers to call "partnerships" rather than "grants." One is that the new sites must maintain an online presence on the PBS site, even if they also have their own URL. (The fund gets money from PBS, the Ford Foundation, and other private sources.) The other is that site creators must match the partnership funding -- either in cash or through in-kind services.
"The price of entry," Weiss says, "is that you need to be passionate about what you're doing. We want people who have a real commitment to their ideas."
