Web @ 30
In his March 1989 Information Management: A Proposal paper, Sir Tim Berners-Lee describes the original premise for the WWW as an approach to enable the people at Cern to share documents easily. While it started at Cern, within three years, the WWW and the HTTP protocol was in the public domain.
An elegant way for researchers across the globe to collaborate, has evolved from a platform for free speech into a swamp seeping disinformation, hate, paedophilia and online bullying.
The DCMS’ Fake News and Disinformation report discusses at length how easy it is for organisations to target social media users en masse in the same way online marketing campaigns are used to sell and recommend products. In the report, the DCMS recommends: “Digital literacy should be a fourth pillar of education. People need to be resilient about their relationship with such sites, particular around what they read and what they write.”
Read more about digital literacy >>