When Tim Berners-Lee stood up and waved to the crowds at the Olympic Games opening ceremony last week, I was suddenly struck by how young he looked. Sure, he's a bit grey-haired, but there was no walking stick, there was no stoop. The founder of the World Wide Web, establisher of the world we know today, was not only still alive, but alive and kicking.
Of course, I'd been aware of this before. It came as no surprise, logically, that he is roughly the same age as my parents. More, it was an emotional reaction, a sudden realisation how fast everything has changed.
The World Wide Web turned 21 on 6 August. It is a fully-fledged adult. It could go for a drink at Teasers if it wanted to and smoke a cigar while it was at it. It may not always behave maturely - it likes to show its inner toddler on message boards like 4Chan and on News24 comment threads. It went through its rough adolescence (a dot-com bust) and garnered a funky nickname in teenagehood (remember "Web 2.0"?), then it graduated from the university of life and got stuck into commerce and enterprise and became a vital member of society.
The World Wide Web is so vital, in fact, that it's startling to me - a so-termed “digital native” - to think of a time without it, of a world with no search engines or forums, no e-commerce or chat rooms. Never mind social networks and apps.
Real-life robots
In my living memory is a time when we would envy characters in science fiction who asked computers directly for information. Great machines with huge processors and hard drives would dig deep to solve the questions of life, the universe and everything.
Now we - that is those of us on this side of the great digital divide - have Google and Wikipedia, and despair when one of them goes down for even a few minutes. And who hasn't felt like a Star Trek character when asking Siri (or one of her contemporaries) for directions to the nearest bakery?
Yesterday the World Wide Web turned 21. It is a fully-fledged adult.
Tallulah Habib, Social media activist
Watching science fiction series that involve going “back in time” to the 90s now really feels like a trip to long, long ago, to a time when the streets of a strange city would be explored without the benefit of a GPS device, and you had to stop at a pay phone if you wanted to call someone while on the go. If you wanted to communicate with someone in another town - or, heaven forbid, another country - you had only the delayed and broken voice over a fixed analogue line or a sketchy fax. Now, I interact regularly with Capetonians and Durbanites, and even occasionally people in other countries over video chat and teleconferencing. It's become a part of daily life.
Let's not even start on social media - the technology that allows us to watch a Mars rover land in real-time or follow the Olympics blow-by-blow from anywhere at any hour.
No going back
Sometimes it seems as if the Web was fated to come into existence. English astronomer, Gerald S Hawkins, theorised in 1983 that human history can be divided into "mindsteps" (or dramatic and irreversible changes to paradigms or world views).
The Internet is one if ever there was one. The world has been brought closer together, knowledge has become widely available to anyone with access to the World Wide Web, uprisings have been orchestrated with the use of social networks, and the power of crowd intelligence has finally been realised. The greatest minds from across the planet can work together to build a better future for mankind. That, if nothing else, is worth celebrating.
Of course the Internet is not perfect. What 21-year-old is? It has a lot of growing still to do, a lot of learning. There are great challenges still left to solve and great enemies left to combat. But, if we've come so far in just 21 years, think what the next 21 could possibly bring?
What an amazing time to be born, what an astonishing world to live in.
Happy birthday World Wide Web!
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