This Is for Everyone
The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web
-
- USD 15.99
-
- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
A Sunday Times Bestseller
The inventor of the World Wide Web explores his vision’s promise—and how it can be redeemed for the future.
Perhaps the most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of technologist. Born in the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, he famously distributed his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward. Its widespread adoption changed everything—transforming humanity into the first digital species. Through the web, we live, work, dream, quarrel, and connect.
In this intimate memoir, Berners-Lee tells the story of his iconic invention, exploring how it launched a new era of creativity and collaboration while unleashing powerful forces that imperil truth and privacy and polarize public debate. With his trademark humor and candor, he recounts how he arrived at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, as a young engineer, and soon came up with the astonishing idea of adding hyperlinks to the then-nascent Internet. His goal was to unleash a wave of creativity and collaboration for the benefit of all—a goal he’s pursued to this day.
Peppered with rich anecdotes and amusing reflections, This Is for Everyone is a gripping, in-the-room account of the rise of the digital world. As the rapid development of artificial intelligence brings new risks and possibilities, Berners-Lee also offers a crucial guide to the decisions ahead—and shows how our digital lives can be reengineered for the sake of human flourishing rather than profit or for power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The man who invented the World Wide Web recaps its spectacular growth and ponders its uncertain future in this knotty memoir-cum-manifesto. Berners-Lee (Weaving the Web) begins by revisiting his achievement while a programmer in Switzerland in 1990 of conceiving and writing the software—URL addresses, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and Hypertext Markup Language (html)—that lets users access websites, files, and images from other computers on their own. He continues on to his stint as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, where he warded off attempts to turn the web into a patchwork of proprietary networks and fought for "net neutrality," the principle that service providers should allow equal access to all web content. When the account wanders into Berners-Lee's techno-optimism, however, it's not always consistent or convincing. He pushes at great length a scheme called "Solid" to enable individuals to control their own data by placing it in digital "pods" in ways that sound fuzzy and dull. He's bullish on AI, but fails to support his assertion that it can analyze a person's data to help them "understand better who really ." As an account of the web's conception, this captivates, but as a forecast of what's to come, it underwhelms. Photos.
