The world wide web - Changing our world forever
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.
The scale of the change, its grand sweep and sometimes its terrible intimacy, has been so enormous as to be almost incomprehensible. It has happened at a pace that is simply unequalled by any other technological or engineering achievement in the history of humanity. Not even the great social changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution that reshaped the western world between 1760 and a point around 1840, or the social liberations facilitated by universal suffrage and democracy, not even the invention of printing, can compare with how the internet has re-engineered our world. It is even arguable that no political, military, or geopolitical shift or domination in history has changed our world, the whole world, in the way universal, hand-held access to the internet has.
Of course, every generation of humanity allows itself the vanity of imagining that the changes it initiates are unprecedented, but there is hardly a better moment in history to argue that case than this week. It is certainly true to say that a more profound change is almost impossible to imagine.
It is amazing, too, to consider how easily — although there have been many casualties and the collateral damage continues apace — we have adopted to this new world. The fluency shown by young people in exploiting technologies their parents could not conceptualise, much less use, is another testimony to the adaptability, imagination, and robustness of our species.
How we best use the internet, how we use it to bolster social justice, equity, and the kind of developments that strengthen human dignity, are the great challenges of our time. How we control the uncontrollable, how we protect ourselves from the unwanted intrusions and oversight the internet makes so easy are another set of the great challenges it brings. These are balanced by the great opportunities the system offers, the way it democratises the power of knowledge. It has become the lingua franca of our time, a fact confirmed by the startling statistic that not even Berners-Lee could have imagined — 1bn of us use Google every day, an option not open to anyone or hardly even imagined just a quarter of a century ago.
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