The world wide web - Changing our world forever

This week the world will mark the 25th anniversary of one of the greatest, deepest, fastest, far-reaching, and evolving changes in how the world’s 7bn people live, and how we will live, for ever more.

The internet has changed utterly, in a far shorter period than even one lifetime, how we interact, communicate, educate, organise, work, do business, inquire, imagine, support, farm, oppose, record, fly, entertain, gamble, generate wealth, overthrow, suppress, bully, travel, exploit, and, for some, make love. It has redefined more or less anything that involves a human and a verb. It is even reshaping how we imagine our place in the universe and how we might extend our tiny, tentative reach across that ever more fathomable web of galaxies.

The milestone will be marked on Wednesday, but the scale of the change initiated in 1989 by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s idea is so great that it might be more accurate to describe the development as crossing a Rubicon, a Rubicon dividing the way we lived before 1989 and the radically different, connected, empowered, and exposed way we live today.