Witch or wizard; WWW (World’s Wicked Wonder)
Rahman Mohamed

Everyone loves a good birthday.  Last year, on May 27, WordPress, the host of Nova’s Rays, celebrated it’s 10th birthday.  Facebook is just a bit younger, celebrating it’s 10th birthday this year on February 4.  Twitter still has two years before it comes of age.  What about the parent of these close siblings, the World Wide Web?

Surprisingly this set of codes, understood only by the chosen ones, is only 25 years old, younger than many of its surfers (the codes that survived both centuries are really only a quarter century).

What is the World Wide Web?  It’s a way to get info from the Internet, a networking infrastructure (the physical stuff) that connects computers together globally to make a network where they can communicate as long as they’re connected to the Internet, by using HTTP protocol (a set of codes), one of the languages spoken over the Internet.

Today if you want to learn something new or old you just have to search the Internet using the Web, once termed the Information Superhighway, and you’ll find it.

Lives of Web surfers have changed.  Some have made millions, but some have committed suicide.  On Tuesday, BBC reported (via webpage) that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the Web said he had “No idea” about how the Web would turn out when he was creating it and said “The web hasn’t changed my life. I haven’t let it.”

Today there’s constant talk of government and corporations invading web-users’ privacy.  Berners-Lee wants a digital bill of rights to protect Internet users from surveillance.  He says “[The Web should be] accessible to all, from any device, and one that empowers all of us to achieve our dignity, rights and potential as humans.”

In a recent speech at Brown University Ogden Memorial Lecture His Highness the Aga Khan said

[T]he Information Revolution, for individuals and for communities, can be a great liberating influence. But it also carries some important risks.
More information at our fingertips can mean more knowledge and understanding. But it can also mean more fleeting attention-spans, more impulsive judgments, and more dependence on superficial snapshots of events. Communicating more often and more easily can bring people closer together, but it can also tempt us to live more of our lives inside smaller information bubbles, in more intense but often more isolated groupings.

The World Wide Web – a wicked wonder?