"Compared even to the development of the phone or TV, the Web developed very quickly"
About this Quote
Speed is the flex here, and Berners-Lee knows it. By placing the Web beside the phone and TV, he’s not just doing a humble inventor’s history lesson; he’s reframing technological change as something that stopped moving in decades and started moving in dog years. The line has the calm tone of a lab report, but the subtext is almost mischievous: you think you understand “media revolutions” because you’ve heard the origin stories, but the Web rewrote the timeline.
The comparison also sneaks in a crucial distinction. The phone and TV scaled through heavy infrastructure, regulated monopolies, and slow cultural onboarding. The Web, by contrast, rode an existing network and a culture already primed for computing. Berners-Lee’s invention wasn’t a new machine in your living room; it was a protocol-level invitation for anyone to publish, link, and build. That openness is why “developed very quickly” isn’t just about engineering velocity. It’s about adoption behaving like contagion: once the basic rules were simple and free to use, the ecosystem exploded without needing permission.
Context matters: the Web arrives at the end of the Cold War, in the rise of globalization, and right before the dot-com frenzy turns connectivity into a business model. The understated phrasing carries an implicit warning, too. If the Web outpaced prior technologies, then our laws, norms, and ethics were always going to be late. The sentence reads like pride, but it lands like a quiet accountability statement.
The comparison also sneaks in a crucial distinction. The phone and TV scaled through heavy infrastructure, regulated monopolies, and slow cultural onboarding. The Web, by contrast, rode an existing network and a culture already primed for computing. Berners-Lee’s invention wasn’t a new machine in your living room; it was a protocol-level invitation for anyone to publish, link, and build. That openness is why “developed very quickly” isn’t just about engineering velocity. It’s about adoption behaving like contagion: once the basic rules were simple and free to use, the ecosystem exploded without needing permission.
Context matters: the Web arrives at the end of the Cold War, in the rise of globalization, and right before the dot-com frenzy turns connectivity into a business model. The understated phrasing carries an implicit warning, too. If the Web outpaced prior technologies, then our laws, norms, and ethics were always going to be late. The sentence reads like pride, but it lands like a quiet accountability statement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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