We know what telephones are for: to call people. We know what television is for: to watch programs. We know what highways are for: to drive places. But we don't know what the Web is for.

So why has the Web been adopted faster than any technology since fire?

There are many ways to look at what's drawing us to the Web. Access to information. Connection to other people. Entrance into communities. The ability to broadcast ideas. None of these are wrong perspectives. But they all come back to the promise of voice.

There's no page like home

At the first Internet World, the vendors were falling over one another offering software and services that would let you "create your own home page in five minutes." Microsoft, IBM, and a hundred smaller shops were all hawking the same goods. You could sit in a booth and create your own home page faster than you can get your portrait sketched on a San Francisco sidewalk.

While the create-a-home-page problem proved too easy to solve to support a software industry, there was something canny about the commercial focus on the creation of home pages. Since you could just as adequately view the Web as a huge reference library, why did home pages seize our imaginations? Because a home page is a place in which we can express who we are and let the world in. Meager though it may be, a home page is a way of having a voice.

The Web's promise of a voice has now gone far beyond that of home pages. The Web is viral. It infects everything it touches — and, because it is an airborne virus, it infects some things it doesn't touch. (This is another manifestation of the great longing we have for the Web.) And the Web has become the new corporate infrastructure, in the form of intranets, turning massive corporate hierarchical systems into collections of many small pieces loosely joined.

To understand how the Web gives voice, we have to be clear that the Web is not primarily a communications medium or information resource. It is, above all else, a place.

All of our language and our experience bear this out. We visit sites, we browse, we go to a page, we build home pages. Even as we're cursing the slowness of the connection, we feel like we're being delayed in going to some site far removed from us.

So the voice that the Web gives us is not the ability to post pictures of our cat and our guesses at how the next episode of The X Files will end. It is the granting of a place in which we can be who we are (and even who we aren't if that's the voice we've chosen).

And it is a public place. That is crucial. Having a voice doesn't mean being able to sing in the shower. It means presenting oneself to others. The Web provides a place like we've never seen before.

Vox populi

The Web and everything the Web infects favor voices. In an economy of attention, what's different wins. When you have 100 emails to read every day, the ones you turn to first are and the ones you remember are the ones that have a distinctive point of view and a distinctive manner of expression.

We may still have to behave properly in committee meetings, but increasingly the real work of the corporation is getting done by quirky individuals who meet on the Web, net the two-hour committee meeting down to two lines (one of which is obscene and the other of which is wickedly funny), and then — in a language and rhythm unique to them — move ahead faster than the speed of management.

The memo is dead. Long live email. The corporate newsletter is dead. Long live racks of 'zines from individuals who do not speak for the corporation. Bland, safe relationships with customers are dead. Long live customer support reps who are willing to get as pissed off at their own company as the angry customer is.

We are so desperate to have our voices back that we are willing to leap into the void. We embrace the Web not knowing what it is, but hoping that it will burn the org chart — if not the organization — down to the ground. Released from the gray flannel handcuffs, we say anything, curse like sailors, rhyme like bad poets, flame against our own values, just for the pure delight of having a voice.

And when the thrill of hearing ourselves speak again wears off, we will begin to build a new world.

Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization and JOHO are trademarks of Evident Marketing, Inc.