The guide asks about innovators and innovations in the early internet, and about how the web changed afterwards. Learn it as a story about who was allowed to publish.
The early milestones, then the three web eras told by who makes the content and who owns the place.
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Innovators to name
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
Designed TCP/IP in the 1970s, the rules that let different networks join into one internet.
Tim Berners-Lee
Proposed the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989: pages, links, URLs and HTTP.
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| Era | Who makes the content | Who owns where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Web 1.0 | Organizations with a web server | The publisher |
| Web 2.0 | Users — everyone with an account | A handful of platforms |
| Web 3.0 (semantic) | Still users, but machine-readable | Contested |
| Web 3.0 (decentralised) | Users | Distributed, in principle |
Two different Web 3.0s: The term is used for a semantic web that machines can understand, and separately for a decentralised web built on blockchain-style ownership. They are different ideas. Say which you mean.
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This is the shift that produced almost everything else in this course. Ordinary people got reach, and a small number of companies got the ground it stands on.
What followed from it
- Reach without a publisher. Anyone can address millions.
- Moderation as a private power. What is allowed is a company policy, not a law.
- Data as the payment. The service is free because attention and data are the price.
- Ranking as editing. Choosing the order is an editorial act performed by an algorithm.
Real-world examples you can name
#BookTok and algorithmic taste — from 2020
A community of readers posting short book videos whose recommendations, amplified by TikTok's ranking, put backlist titles onto bestseller lists years after publication and changed how publishers market fiction.
Who it affected: Readers, authors and booksellers — an industry reshaped by a recommender.
The Christchurch attack livestream and the Christchurch Call — attack March 2019; Call launched May 2019
An attacker livestreamed a mass shooting; copies were re-uploaded faster than moderation systems removed them. New Zealand and France then convened governments and platforms around a shared commitment to eliminate terrorist content online.
Who it affected: The victims' communities, and moderators and users exposed to the footage.
The Internet of Things: networking everywhere: The Internet of Things (IoT) is everyday objects with sensors and a network connection that send data without a person typing anything: a smart meter, a fitness band, a shipping container's tracker. When almost everything is connected, networking becomes ubiquitous: present everywhere, and mostly unnoticed.
How this is tested — you have to describe the change and then say who gained and who lost by it. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — structured question
- Part a: identify a development in the internet or web
- Part c: evaluate whether the web's evolution has been good for users
Paper 2 — source-based question
- Q2: explain a claim about how the web has changed
- Q3: contrast sources on the power of platforms
The trap: nostalgia: “The old web was better” is not an argument. Say for whom, measured against what.
Explain one way in which Web 2.0 changed who holds power over what is published.
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To what extent has the development of the web given ordinary people more power?
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