Has the Internet Made the World a Better Place?

[wayfriend]

Interestingly enough, the "inventor of the internet", Tim Berners-Lee, was celebrated on Google last week. The 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web.

He's not to happy about it's current state.

The World Wide Web is 30 years old tomorrow. A day earlier, its founder, English engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, first proposed the system that would become the WWW on March 11th, 1989. To acknowledge the anniversary, he's revisited his ideas about the internet in a new letter published today.

Berners-Lee admits that the internet now has a lot of problems. Users are plagued by online harassment, state-sponsored hacks, and other criminal behavior. Ad-based revenue models reward clickbait, while there is a constant viral spread of fake news. And even though they can be rewarding, social media platforms have also become home to political outrage and polarizing conversations.

Still, Berners-Lee is hopeful about humans' and systems' capacity to improve. He says:

But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can't be changed for the better in the next 30. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web.

[link]

Even it's inventor is worried about how much bad has come with the good.

Time to recognize it. Or else it won't get fixed.

[Skyweir]

Agreed that it needs recognition, acknowledgement TO be addressed, remedied, improved.

Surely the risks of abuse and exploitation the WWW would face.

I liked the Berners-Lee quote .. that it can be improved and .. tbh the scrapping of the WWW would not be an effective addressing of the issues, given the costs of rebuilta better model. No need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

Particularly given that the problems facing the WWW are all human. And as humans are the primary users such problems arent just going to go away unless humans change the way they interface with the interwebz

[Avatar]

The thing is, I think trying to "fix" it will also impact a lot of the good too.

--A

[Skyweir]

Yes that is likely an inevitability.

Hard to make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.