It’s the web’s 29th birthday! The milestones
Happy birthday to the World Wide Web!
Or conception day, maybe – which was 12 March 1989. The WWW was officially invested 29 years ago today when Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal for a new information system at CERN.
“Vague, but exciting,” his supervisor wrote on the cover of the document, laconically greeting an invention which would transform the world’s economy – and its society too.
Not everybody thinks it has changed things for the better though.
Using our ranked poll, tell us which of the web developments over the last 29 years you think have been the most important.
Once upon a time, videos had to be downloaded in their entirety before they could be watched. It took a lot of software engineers a lot of work to develop a system that allowed videos to be streamed, or watched at the same time as they were downloaded. Now, funny cat videos can propagate just as fast as the ramblings of Holocaust deniers.
At a mouse click, we have access to thousands of video tutorials on almost every conceivable subject, and documentaries about the rest.
A growing economy in web streaming services complements private caches of our most embarrassing moments captured by mischievous friends. Video streaming has given us memes, rejuvenated the music video, and also delivered a concerningly large corpus of pornography.
There was a time when we had to unfold a small gazebo covering in order to find out what was happening in the world around us. News websites make that process much easier, employing a generation of highly educated graduates to entertain us with informative listicles (which sometimes excitingly let us rank the items through an interactive “voting” element – how radical!) which we sneer at but also collectively endorse with our attention far more than we do longer written pieces. Benefits include quicker access to big stories which affect our lives. Negatives… gosh, where to start…
E-commerce positives are obvious. There’s nothing worse than actually leaving the house, so the opportunity to sit in our underwear and be the consumers we were raised to be is perhaps the quintessential experience that the web can offer us. From auction sites through to cheap retail outlets, from clothes to pizza, the ability for us to shop online has generated an enormous amount of economic activity and afforded shoppers far more time to enjoy the other web offerings listed here. The negatives include the monopolisation of all retail and society’s eventual collapse.
Back in the early days of the web, anybody who had access to a middle point in a computer network had the ability to snoop on the communications passing through there. Suggestions of using cryptography to secure communications were robustly resisted by allied governments – particularly because of their interests in conducting this snooping.
The march of technology and requirements of commerce ultimately triumphed however, and the access to public cryptography is now widespread. Encryption has enabled e-commerce and e-customers to defend themselves from hackers, and those same hackers and their terrorist friends to defend themselves from law enforcement.
To some video games are nothing more than an attempt to cash-in on the male fantasy. To others (mostly males) they are a burgeoining art form which is now easily collaborated on by developers, sold by games labels, and downloaded and played by gamers all thanks to the wonders of the web. Both views are likely true. E-sports offer the most committed players the opportunity of celebrity while emotionally-charged independent games such as Papers, Please have been lauded for introducing moral decisions as a powerful feature of the narrative.
The advent of the internet forum really began with Usenet, a distributed discussion system which pre-existed the World Wide Web. Social media was a wholly web-owned phenomenon though, where the content is created by the users and those same users’ interactions with that content generating data which the social media platform provider monetises via advertisements. Love it or hate it, instead of listing the good and bad let’s just some samples and let you choose where they belong: Facebook, Myspace, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pintrest, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube. Then you can share this article and let everyone else know where you think they belong.
Memes are a definitive artefact of web culture, even if the word itself has become nothing more than a euphemism for jokes. While it was first proposed to mean a kind of cognitive information which spread from person to person, memes are now viral items of content which drive tagging and expression within a variety of exceptionally creative formats. They are inherently representative of web culture being endlessly reproducible, modifiable, and usually dependent upon some form of intellectual property theft.
We’re not just talking about apps here, but the ability to interact with thousands of strangers a day who are seeking what you are, whether that’s the dizzying highs of a one night stand or the excruciating comforts of a long-term relationship all without going through the inefficient process of meeting them in the flesh first. Critics say that online dating has driven a “swipe left” culture in which sexual partners are disposable and meaningful relationships are transitory. Proponents say that online dating has driven a “swipe right” culture in which sexual partners are flexible and meaningful relationships are more likely to be natural, rather than being based on a fondness driven by familiarity and a need to establish inheritance of the farm.
The web has turned the practice of both overt and covert nuisance communication into a artform. The hypothetical positives include a hardier population which is discerning of false information and immunised against logical fallacies. The observable negatives are widespread casual harassment of women, ethnic minorities, people within LGBTQ community, and anybody different to anybody else at all in any conceivable way.
Source: news.sky.com
The post It’s the web’s 29th birthday! The milestones appeared first on Ultimate FM.
Happy birthday to the World Wide Web! Or conception day, maybe – which was 12 March 1989. The WWW was officially invested 29 years ago today when Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal for a new information system at CERN. “Vague, but exciting,” his supervisor wrote on the cover of the document, laconically greeting an […]
The post It’s the web’s 29th birthday! The milestones appeared first on Ultimate FM.
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