The concept of cyberspace, moreover, with its fathomless resource of information, has revolutionised the way we work, shop and play. Without Sir Tim Berners-Lee there would be no Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook or MySpace. It is no exaggeration to call his invention the most significant since the printing press.
But it has also helped gamblers bankrupt themselves, fraudsters prey on the gullible, and pornographers sell their virtual wares; and, of course, it has created a sinister new breed of paedophile. That's partly what I mean by characterising Sir Tim as a Dr Frankenstein. His monster could prove to be a force for good or bad. The jury is still out.
"I had the idea for it. I defined how it would work. But it was actually created by people," he says. "So when you refer to the web as a monster, well, yes, it has all these arms and legs but the arms and legs are humanity. The technology allows humanity to express itself and interact. If you are frightened of it, then you are frightened of what humanity can do.
"One fear is that, because of the web, we will all end up speaking McDonald's English across the globe and end up with a vocabulary of 2,000 words. It might make everything too bland.
"The other is the opposite of this: that it will lead to cults and cultural potholes. But there are few global things on the web. There is no one newspaper read all over the globe because, actually, the web is composed of a tangled mess of groups of different sizes. They all interconnect, so you don't have one mushy group. That is the middle path. Interconnected communities. That is how the world can survive."
Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -
But it has also helped gamblers bankrupt themselves, fraudsters prey on the gullible, and pornographers sell their virtual wares; and, of course, it has created a sinister new breed of paedophile. That's partly what I mean by characterising Sir Tim as a Dr Frankenstein. His monster could prove to be a force for good or bad. The jury is still out.
"I had the idea for it. I defined how it would work. But it was actually created by people," he says. "So when you refer to the web as a monster, well, yes, it has all these arms and legs but the arms and legs are humanity. The technology allows humanity to express itself and interact. If you are frightened of it, then you are frightened of what humanity can do.
"One fear is that, because of the web, we will all end up speaking McDonald's English across the globe and end up with a vocabulary of 2,000 words. It might make everything too bland.
"The other is the opposite of this: that it will lead to cults and cultural potholes. But there are few global things on the web. There is no one newspaper read all over the globe because, actually, the web is composed of a tangled mess of groups of different sizes. They all interconnect, so you don't have one mushy group. That is the middle path. Interconnected communities. That is how the world can survive."
Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -
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