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 mimus they found that the warmest regions shown here in yellow

resemble pac-man eating the crater

like a dot. I learned about Mimus 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 inter net 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 nineteen sixties 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 to 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 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 one second on the web you can see how many

Facebook Likes tweets and even emails 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 fishing

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 1990's 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 its 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 for 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 Stephen 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

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 Unomuno 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 one percent of the web

it's not ten percent its eighty percent

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 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