Berners-Lee on Past and Future of the Web

Agree, if only for the construction of the Wikipedia, it would have been worth inventing and Building the Web.   When we experimented with early hypertext knowledge storage ideas we started to see the value emerge, but had no idea what was coming. Not Utopia, but another world.

From Utopia to Dystopia, and Back Again   By Bennie Mols

Last year, Sir Tim Berners-Lee received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and the "Nobel Prize of computing," for his invention of the World Wide Web, the first Web browser, "and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale."

Berners-Lee proposed what we now call the Web in 1989, while he was working for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland (his boss at the time called his proposal "vague, but exciting").

During the Turing Award Lecture he presented last week at the Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, during the 10th International ACM Web Science Conference (WebSci'18), Berners-Lee led the audience on a passionate route along the past, present, and future of the Web; "From Utopia to Dystopia and back again?" as he called it.

Back in 1989, the same year in which central and eastern Europe were full of political turmoil—with the fall of the Berlin Wall as an iconic highlight—and in which the world was full of new political dreams, the World Wide Web that Berners-Lee envisioned was similarly full of dreams. He felt the Web should become an open, decentralized platform where everybody should be able to share information across geographic and cultural boundaries, allowing creativity and cooperation to bloom.

These dreams have only partly come true, said Berners-Lee.  As an example, he points to Wikipedia: "It's amazing that humanity has created something like Wikipedia. Only for this was it worth to have invented the Web."

In recent years, however, the Web has suffered some collateral damage, said Berners-Lee, who said he worries about the loss of control over personal data, the ease with which misinformation can spread, the personalization of political advertising, and the power of social media platforms.

"You can see these things as emergent phenomena that couldn't have been predicted from the original design," said Berners-Lee. "The way in which people interact with the Web is very complicated. We now have about the same number of Web pages as humans have neurons in the brain. We do not understand the brain very well, and therefore we need neuroscience and cognitive science; in the same way, we need Web science as a separate discipline. Web science can, along with the social sciences, help us to understand how the Web works. It can also help us to build better systems which lead people to be constructive."   .... "