DID YOU KNOW? THE WEB IS THE GREATEST INVENTION OF MAN TODAY! In 1989, a youngish British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, was trying to work out a way to share information with colleagues at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN (1954). They were already using the internet (1972), then a sort of scaled-up messaging facility that enabled files to be sent from one computer network to another. But Berners-Lee devised a way to store the pages in a central information bank, much like the great library of Alexandria (3rd century BC), only infinitely bigger. Knowledge and information are in themselves of incalculable value, and sometimes danger, but the web is much, much more. Already this morning, I have performed all the vital functions of the home-worker: checked the weather forecast, bought a train ticket, played a game of Scrabble and sent a birthday message to a friend across the world. Thanks to the web, we can sit at home and be connected; we can work and be parents at the same time. I can share videos of my children with friends and family around the world, whether they like it or not, and send an article to a young scientist living in the Comoro Islands, halfway from Tanzania to Madagascar. The web has transformed at least a dozen fields: education, news, book publishing, music, finance, networking, dating, charity donations, shopping, language-learning, cartography, medicine, hypochondria and the way we talk to friends. But above all it has fanned the movement for democratic change in countries whose inhabitants used to be hobbled by the fear that they were alone. The web enabled them to reach out, find support at home and abroad, and muster the courage to overthrow their tyrants. It helped them bring in the promise, at least, of a brighter dawn. Ask a young Egyptian, Tunisian or Libyan to name the greatest invention, and they might well choose the world wide web. Paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors, scissors cut paper, but the web trumps them all.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 10:48:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015