Essay IX : On the development of the World Wide Web

 Thoughts on the Development of Internet

(And its social role)

Essay for the University of Michigan.

Since the beginning of mankind, there has been a need of sharing our knowledge and information through different ways, as well as different ways to keep it secure or encrypted, be it through oral tradition, homing pigeons, morse code, etc. In the last century, especially in the 1930's, this need became an urgent necessity due to the times of war and the impact the speed of information delivery had on the warfield. Up to this day, the most developed nations keep this "information war" going, and back in the 1930's, the efforts to make the information delivery quicker were totally fundamental for a nation's victory in the warfield. That's why projects like Bletchley Park got great ammounts of governmental funding.

The interesting thing is, that information encompasses a lot of different disciplines and points of view, ranging from mathematics to encrypt the code to philosophy in order to understand the nature of the information that may be provided or received.

The key elements of a good informative process have always been the quality of the message to provide or receive, the source of the information and the media used to provide or receive the information. In my opinion, I consider that these factors have been crucial to the development of a big information network, since the beginnings of Information Technology. Through all its different phases, the emphasis has always been to keep the information as secret as possible, but what happens when you (as a scientist or philosopher) start to think "Why not use this same technology to improve the way our society works?".

You may have an ethic question in the top of your mind, and that's what happened in the early days of internet, when people like Larry Smarr and Douglas Van Houweling questioned the almost exclusive nature of high-tech equipment, that was only available to a "Privileged Few" (Usually, the Military and the Government) and proposed the use of these equipments for Academic and Research purposes in colleges, and even considered (and suggested) the domestic use of this technology for the sake of improving the ways people communicated and worked.

As usual, they met initial counter-action. It is no surprise that the social elite tried to keep the best technology for themselves only, whatever their reasons are. But fortunately for everyone in the academia and domestic world, Smarr and Van Houweling were people who never gave up and keep their efforts going, and without them, maybe we would not have access to technology for academic purposes and high-speed communications through the internet as we know it today. We may still use Homing Pigeons.