The year is 1989 when the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee presented his idea of hyperlinks at the Swiss nuclear research center CERN. At that time, Berners-Lee was only concerned with not always having to send scientific texts around by e-mail, but with linking them to a digital place independent of the individual computers: the website. Now we are celebrating their 30th birthday. On April 30, 1993, the World Wide Web was released by CERN. Today we are talking about a digital revolution.
But when exactly did this revolution begin? “The Internet existed before 1989 – e-mail systems and newsgroups that were used for data exchange,” explains communication scientist Professor Martin Emmer from Freie Universität Berlin. “But it wasn’t until the 1990s that the WWW became a mass medium.”
In terms of technology, the network was free and freely accessible to everyone – actually. Nevertheless, it worked early on in the mass media: “Hardly anyone built their own website. Websites and the servers were ultimately provided by larger institutions and companies – centrally.” But it spread: In the 2000s, more than half of Germany’s population was online. In the global South, too, almost everyone now has a digital identity, as in some African countries, where you pay digitally with your cell phone. “But the web only really became participatory with social media,” explains Martin Emmer.
In 2003 Facebook went online. Twitter 2006, Whatsapp 2009, Instagram 2010 followed. Between the extraterrestrial beeping modem trying to connect to the internet and the fluid alternation between analog and digital identity when posting voice messages, videos and photos, there are 30 years that have passed steadily advancement. Now we are facing the next big revolution: artificial intelligence (AI).
With AI, the network is becoming more commercialized
“Everything that is invested in AI has completely different dimensions than the website: there are gigantic server farms and data centers,” emphasizes Martin Emmer. He fears that this will further commercialize the network. “Meanwhile, this platforming has dragged essential parts of the Internet into company front gardens. This is a problem because many of the things that are happening in society are now difficult to observe.” How can a society agree and enforce rules when its social life is increasingly withdrawn from the public?
Emmer’s team, who is also founding director of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, is researching, for example, whether hate speech can be combated by AI or how disinformation spreads. “These dynamics are difficult to explore when much of the data is privately owned,” says Emmer.
Nevertheless, he also sees positive developments. In the social media, the gap between the elite and less privileged people is smaller than in the analogue society. Political participation is also more diverse online. But: “The hope for a technical solution to social divisions is usually not fulfilled. What is wrong in society is also wrong on the internet. That will probably also apply to AI.” In this respect, the WWW is only as old, as immature or as wise as all of us. Happy Birthday!
