Friday, April 7, 2023

WHERE IS TIM BERNERS-LEE, THE INVENTOR OF THE WORLD WIDE WEB, TODAY?

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 Looking at how the internet has changed society to the point of molding it head to toe, how do you figure the internet's creator feels about it? Is he hanging his head in endless sorrow at how the world's most revolutionary tool of information democratization has been reduced to cat memes, self-aggrandizing social media influencers, and society-fracturing echo chambers algorithmically driven by ad bucks? Okay, maybe that's too harsh (maybe). After all, Sir Tim Berners-Lee seemed to be pretty upbeat about the whole thing during his Internet Hall of Fame induction. And as the announcer says, he's the guy who "invented the world wide web." 

But hang on, didn't Al Gore invent the internet? Not quite. That's just a long-standing joke that circulated ages ago. Gore was more of a business casual Greta Thunberg prototype who also took planes, as his 2006 climate change-addressing documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" attests. Al Gore did, however, pave the governmental way for the development and expansion of the "Information Superhighway" going back to his time as a congressman in the 1970s, as the Internet Hall of Fame describes.

Tim Berners-Lee is the one who developed the actual technology that forms the backbone of the internet, specifically the connection between individual computers (clients) and the data processing hubs they communicate with (servers). As the Internet Hall of Fame again describes, Berners-Lee created HTTP technology for grabbing data, URLs, HTML code, and more. Since then he's been advocating heavily for a transparent, fairer internet for all. 

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