After a quarter-century, hoping World Wide Web connects to its roots

Monday was the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web becoming open to the public. It’s hard to believe that it has been 25 years, right?

In some ways it seems like it’s part of new-age technology. In others, it is impossible to remember life before immediate access, buying living room furniture on your phone and bellyaching about WiFi access.

On that April Friday in 1993, CERN, the short name for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, released the codes to the public. It made it available to everyone and offered endless possibilities of technology to us.

It begs a very different business question. If CERN had kept what was the original pathway that is the internet, as a company CERN would make Facebook look like Floyd’s Barbershop.

And it’s hard to wonder if there’s a bigger double-sided question out there than are we better off for it?

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in the late 1980s, told NPR a year ago that he is growing more and more troubled by the place in which the internet resides — a home for vitriol and venom, one-liners and hatred covered under the anonymity of nameless handles and the blanket of free speech.

The information highway Berners-Lee started as the easiest way for researchers to share knowledge and technology has done so much more than anyone could have imagined. And this is a guy with quite the imagination, considering he introduced the first Web browser, crafted the language for creating webpages (HTML) and essentially developed the algorithms that planted the seeds that have allowed the Web to become what it is today.

“I spent the first 20 years of the Web telling people, just give everybody unfettered nondiscriminatory access to the internet. Let people build websites, let them link to each other. Good stuff will happen,” Berners-Lee told NPR. “It was designed to be universal. The whole point was breaking apart silos.”

And boy did it ever. Until it became the super speedway of silos and the highway of hatred.

Access to information, people, places, industries and everything in between. From cat videos to chat rooms to what has become the avalanche of social media avenues that allow universal access to individuals everywhere.

That access, while noble in concept and idealistic as an idea, has turned the technological tide. What was designed to demolish silos has made us more connected and more isolated than ever.

Think of the ways our lives have changed. The last time you looked up a phone number. Or bought a map. Remember record stores?

We can watch anything, see anything, listen to anything while truly experiencing very little.

Reviews are rampant. Photos — good and obscene — are everywhere.

In the previous 250 years, the advances to the printing press, the telephone and the camera each changed society. The internet has been all of them and altered all of them with monster changes (such as Monster.com) and blockbuster ripples (like toppling Blockbuster, and kids, ask your folks).

Some are amazing. The information at our fingertips has never been greater.

Some are agonizing. The misinformation overflowing our daily life has never been greater.

It’s hard to fathom that it only took 25 years to completely change so many ways we are different as people and a society. We are more educated than ever. News consumption has never been greater.

But the leaks of information and terms like “fake news” and “click bait” cause division, confusion and frustration. Certainly the creator had little idea of Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram and all the other stone-throwing, type-before-you-think, hitsend-too-soon platforms that give voices to everyone with thumbs, IQ be darned.

So Happy 25th World Wide Web, you have been amazing. And agonizing.

Here’s hoping the next 25 offer more of Berners-Lee’s original goal of connectivity. And, of course, cat videos.