Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Mimas is one of Saturn's cutest moons.
Its entire surface area is about the same as
Spain but its giant crater makes it look like the
Death Star. And when NASA made a temperature map
of Mimas, they found that the warmest regions, shown here in yellow,
resemble Pac-Man eating the crater
like a dot. I learned about Mimas whilst
surfing the world wide web like a true internaut.
But the Web and the
Internet are different things. The World Wide Web
and the Internet have names that are similar shapes but they
catch different things. And, as we will see,
surfing the world wide web is radical
but it's also apropos. Metaphorically speaking
the web is pretty wet.
Before the web existed, and before the Internet existed,
there were computers but they were big
and lonely. They couldn't really talk to one another.
I mean, sure, you could connect similar pieces of hardware that spoke similar
protocols but that was just
a network. To connect disparate global machines
you would need a network of networks.
And in the 1960s a bunch of brilliant minds collaborated on just
such a thing. Now, at the time, the phone companies weren't very interested
and because no single institution could foot the entire responsibility
and computing power needed for dedicated lines... Well,
more innovative and efficient methods were used.
A system spanning many nations is international.
So, a system spanning many networks
is an Internetwork. It wouldn't be until 1974,
in this very document, that the word Internetwork
would be officially shortened to what we use today - Internet.
On October 29th, 1969,
exactly 100 days after we first
landed on a distant rock across space,
we first landed a letter on a
distant screen across the Internet. Leonard Kleinrock and a team at UCLA
decided to send the word
'login' to a different model of computer at Stanford.
They sent the 'L' and it arrived. They sent the 'O'
and it arrived. And then the system crashed.
But still, the first message sent over an Internet
was a big deal. On a list of technological achievements it would rank
quite high, even though it was literally
lo... Fast-forward
two decades. CERN is working on a lot of different projects with different people
and technologies
to figure out who or what is doing what...
You can just look it up on the Internet. But the way information was organized on the internet
was illogical. Based on hierarchies,
linearly, it was lame. And this annoyed a guy
named Tim Berners-Lee. You see, you could follow a tree for a really long time
only to reach a person or technology involved in some other project
and for information on that you have to go back to the beginning and start all
over again.
So, in March of 1989, Tim Berners-Lee
wrote a powerful paper simply titled "Information management:
A Proposal." He argued that notes with links,
like references, between them is far more useful than a
fixed hierarchical system. Instead of trees,
Berners-Lee was proposing a web.
Webbed systems that connect documents in nonlinear ways already existed.
They were called hypertext. But Tim Berners-Lee
officiated the marriage of hypertext webs and the Internet
to produce a web that was worldwide. It was the vast connected logical and
useful partnership needed to make the Internet the most quickly adopted
form of communication in our species' history.
The Internet connects participants,
the web connects information. Specifically
hypertext documents accessed via the Internet.
You can see the computer Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web with
in the London Science Museum. Twenty-five years ago
if you had unplugged this computer you would have literally shut down
the entire web. The first website
was info.cern.ch. Today it provides a simulator that allows you to
view the web
as it appeared as a baby. We've come
a long way since this. If you really want your mind blown,
check out Onesecond[.designly.com] on the web. You can see how many
Facebook likes, Tweets and even e-mails are sent every second
and how many have been sent since you first opened the page.
Isaac Asimov once said that Earth should have been named
ocean because the sea is its dominant
feature. Our oceans are vast
and dangerous and deep and mysterious. So, it's no mystery that when people needed
a metaphor to describe the Internet
and the seemingly endless and often uncharted
web of hypertext it delivered, they ran for the sea.
We surf the web, navigating
streams of data. There are pirates and floods and phishing.
Even blogs and vlogs have their linguistic origins
in logs - records originally kept by captains at sea.
Like liquid water, the web is a phenomenal solvent.
It makes material widely accessible and available.
It has been estimated that every web page is an average
of only 19 clicks away from every
other web page. Like our oceans,
the web is really just one global
sea. And like our oceans, the web
is an ecosystem we need to be careful to protect.
It is flexible and flowing, and as we are finding out,
the web, like liquid water, is something you can see yourself in.
In the 1990s, Douglas Rushkoff coined the term
screenagers to describe a generation that for the first time ever was growing
up to think that images
on screens weren't just something to passively stare at,
but, instead, were something to be manipulated.
Well, today it's even more extreme.
The tools and connectivity, provided by the Web, allow us to think
of images on screens not just as things to manipulate
but as things to project our own identities onto.
Not everyone who does this is a professional storyteller
or acclaimed poet or coherent.
But, content aside, hyperlinked webs of human expression are incredibly rich enviroments
and they exercise the brain, more so than books?
Well, for the sake of argument,
let's read from "Everything Bad is Good for You,"
a book by Steven Johnson. Now, in this passage
he imagines a world in which books were invented
after video games and the World Wide Web.
Kids everywhere are starting to read these new fangled
books and teachers and parents are concerned. He imagines
they might say something like this:
"Perhaps the most dangerous property of these books
is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path.
You can't control their narratives in any fashion. You simply sit back
and have the story dictated to you.
For those of us raised on interactive narratives, this property may seem
astonishing. Why would anyone want to embark on an adventure
utterly choreographed by another person?
But today's generation embarks on such adventures
millions of times a day. Reading is not an
active participatory process, it's a submissive one.
The book readers of the younger generation are learning
to follow the plot instead of learning to lead."
Interesting. But you might be thinking, come on,
Michael, you can't set content aside that easily.
What about all the dumb and superficial stuff the web propagates?
I mean, surely a lot of it is just completely useless. We're humans, after all, we should
be valuing reason. Maybe.
But is that really what makes us special? As Unamuno said,
"more often I have seen a cat reason
than laugh or weep. Perhaps it weeps or laughs
inwardly. But then perhaps, also inwardly, a crab resolves equations
of the second degree." What if cheap laughs and sappy poems and gossip and
whining and drama and selfies really are
the most human thing the web has allowed us to do?
That's deep. But not as deep as the Deep Web,
the hidden web. The part of the web invisible
to search engines. Now, most of this stuff is innocuous content hidden behind pay
walls or password protection
or dynamically created web pages. But we haven't
even indexed this stuff. And it's not 1% of the web,
it's not 10%. It's 80%
of the entire World Wide Web.
The web is a deep ocean
and we are frantically making waves in it. For instance, take a look at real time
emoji usage on Twitter and say a few words of encouragement to be
least popular emoji. We are also exploring the web
frantically. It's an entirely new frontier. Every single day
Google receives 500 million search queries
it has never been asked before.
Where will all of this exploration lead?
Who knows? But to go back to our metaphor, the very same suits we built to explore
the depths of the ocean
inspired and enabled the suits we would later use
to go beyond Earth. So, keep exploring,
keep surfing.
And as always,
thanks for watching.