Happy 30th Birthday, World Wide Web! (What's Next?)

Thirty years ago - on March 12, 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for a way to use the (then in its infancy) internet to more easily share information via something called "hyper-text."

Berners-Lee's proposal - with comments from supervisor: "Vague, but exciting."

The world wide web was born, and things would never be the same. Anyone younger than 30 has never known a world with out the World Wide Web, and would probably find it hard to conceive of such an existence. In fact, the World Wide Web is, for many "users," taken for granted, accepted as a fact of life, a default reality. But passive acceptance of the Web, and uncritical consumption of its content poses some really big problems.

I encourage my Digital Communications students to THINK about their work as digital communicators from different perspectives, and to sometimes step back and look at the big picture. One way to do this is to read this short piece by Berners-Lee called "30 years on, What's Next for the Web?" Read, reflect, respond, and THINK.

Sir Tim Berners Lee arriving at the Guildhall to receive
the Honorary Freedom of the City of London
(Photo by Paul Clark - CC 4.0)