This reminded me of Weinberger's statement:

Because the linked pages come from many people, the Web turns into a place larger than we are. It is a public place, a place we can enter, wander, and get lost in, but cannot own (56).

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work is the attempt to physically enact the ephemeral quality of linking on the web. The art was not merely about the arches and the curtains, but about how they all moved together in the weather. The specific part to whole relationship. But soon I found myself watching people across the park, or the very large dog who sat calmly while four small children circled and pet it for several minutes. I was quick to note people on cell phones, the castle in the center of the park where people stood looking over the park. I wanted an arial view, but I also wanted to just be in this moment -- the one that was a whirlwind of input and stimuli.

I took no pictures while I was wandering through the park, but here are many places you can see them . These pictures to me are quite telling of the whole experience. They show not only the gates as a whole, but single gates, and people (and dogs) moving through them. So like Christo and Jeanne-Claude say:

The work of art in The Gates is the entire environment, in this case Central Park and its surrounding environs. To experience the artwork, one immerses oneself into that environment. Each separate "gate" would be merely a relic of the artwork and not a work of art. Seven thousand, five hundred structures together in Central Park IS a work of art.

But all of this discussion leaves out the people because they become merely a part of the environment. A part of the structure, but not significant enough to place as a defining part of the art itself. What if no one came? Would The Gates have still been a work of art? Presumably for Jeanne-Claude, the answer would be yes because as she said to an NBC reporter the day before the gates were unfurled: "I don't care if you like it. Like it or don't. We do this because we like it, and that's enough for me." So The Gates then becomes part of a story of the artist whose primacy of vision is what matters. No matter how much the piece may disrupt time and space, it is the solitary vision that we seem to come back to -- the individual, the person.

According to Weinberger, however, this is not so much the case with the web. If we follow his argument, the web is driven by interest, but interests vary so you may not have the interest of many but you should always have the interest of a few. And it is this idea of smaller, more focused, and ever changing social groupings that makes the web seem more-real (or at least more human) to Weinberger. And if we leave it at that, it does sound like a pretty utopic and revolutionary space. BUT the people who participate, navigate, populate, and show their interest across the web have not changed.

So when Weinberger writes about Mahir, and how everyone loved his website because it was an example of human imperfection, he misses something crucial in this telling. The reason that this website was imperfect was its imperfect use of English. Thus we are confronted with our biases (be they racist or not) for standard English, or at least we notice something when it is not that way. This example, at least for me, shows how people bring their already preconceived biases to their interests, and therefore, we need to take care when we begin to sing the praises of how the web restructures human relationships. Just like my initial reaction to The Gates where I believed that this art was a new way of encompassing space and time all the while forgetting that it is still in contained space -- Central Park. So it is more useful for me to begin to see it as an illustration of the relationships that are often mystified by our concepts of time and space, instead of a replacement or remediation of them.

The more I read Weinberger, the more I see his text as doing just that. There are moments where he seems to be producing a utopian vision of the possibilities of the web, but then his choice of examples and the stories he tells disrupt that vision. It is the interplay between the real and more real nature of the web that interests me, and I believe that it interests Weinberger, too. It's not that the web will restructure human relations in totality, but it is that the web will help us understand our own humanity and systems which contain it more readily. And for me, that's plenty.