The Web and us

1989 was a defining year for humankind. It was the year the world began to connect. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee originally proposed the World Wide Web that year, nobody really knew just how influential it would be. In just 25 short years, the Web has transformed the lives of billions of people across the planet. It has created just as many problems as it has resolved, but most would agree that the benefits significantly outweigh the challenges.

The last 25 years have been an astonishing period of change. The development of the Web has been more rapid and pervasive than anyone could have predicted. From a personal perspective, the Web has changed forever the way I live and work. I believe the Web has also had a profound influence on the way I think. I believe it has also made me more creative. The way I now represent knowledge is based not solely upon the books and journals I used to heavily rely upon, but also on instantaneous conversations and discussions through social media, the immediacy of content on blogs and videos, constant connections with family, friends and colleagues wherever I find myself in the world, and timely updates about the things I am interested in, all available on my personal devices. I can also create my own content with relative ease, and receive rich feedback from my online networked community of peers. This is a valuable part of my professional practice, and I don't know what I would do without it. Even shopping online has become an educational experience. You never know what you will learn or what new ideas you will encounter each and every time you venture onto the Web.

All of the above activities were inconceivable prior to 1989. The Web has changed the way I think, because I now expect to be able to do all this, and rely on my connections to perform my various professional roles. I can research a subject any time of the day or night, without needing to go anywhere further than to my laptop or smart phone. The worldwide conversations continue 24 hours each day, as time zones come alive and people connect into the shared global space that is the Web. We are a networked society now, and there is no going back.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee now heads up the World Wide Web Consortium, which was established to develop the standards of the Web. Sir Tim maintains his earliest vision and ethos of the Web which was to share knowledge freely across the globe, and on his Twitter site states 'Let the Web serve humanity.' His major concern now is that freedom of speech on the Web is being eroded and has called for a global bill of rights to protect users. From an educational perspective, the Web must be protected. Knowledge is being democratised, and is being shared more freely than ever before, and we should jealously protect this. One of the major shifts in this paradigm is that everyone and anyone can now create and share content on a global stage to a potentially worldwide audience. If that were taken away, the world would be a poorer place.

Another major shift is that those who once held a monopoly on knowledge are now seeing their control slipping from their grasp as people everywhere take up the challenge to create knowledge in as many forms as imagination allows. Anyone who believes in democracy must view the Web as a means to achieve it at a global level. The Web gives us all a voice.

There are already examples. The people's encylopaedia - Wikipedia - is now the largest in the world, and continues to grow, eclipsing previous megaliths such as Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The publishing world, the music and film industries, even large corporates, all must sit up and take notice of people power, because the Web facilitates this, and in doing so provides a very powerful alternative for creation, repurposing, organisation and distribution of new content.

So happy birthday to the Web, and may the next 25 years be even more astounding, game breaking and revolutionary.

Photo by Luc Viatour on Wikimedia Commons


The Web and us by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.