British scientist Tim Berners-Lee made a considerable impact on humanity’s everyday lives. With the invention of the World Wide Web, people all over the globe had the ability to access information and communicate with each other. Many people regard the creation of the World Wide Web as the beginning of the “Information Age” or the “4th Industrial Revolution”. The first endeavor towards creating the World Wide Web was around 1989, when Berners-Lee was frustrated; when working at CERN, scientists had to physically move to other computers when they needed to access specific information. As a result, he created a prototype for the World Wide Web in 1990, which featured a HTML, URI, and HTTP. Next, a web page became accessible to anyone that had an internet connection. A few years later, the number of websites had grown rapidly, to about 2,700 pages in 1994, including some well known today: Amazon and Yahoo. In present day, there are about 2 billion websites. 

Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web has transformed our society in numerous ways. The first, and probably most significant is the groundbreaking new way to communicate with people far away. Thanks to Berners-Lee’s invention, humans can essentially contact anyone in the entire world. In recent years, online communication became prevalent within social media.Through these networks, trends are spread, altering the way communities live their everyday lives. For example, the latest fashion styles, the new effective diets, the “must need” items, and the well-known current phrases are all widespread due to the fast communication of the World Wide Web. Also, people often meet friends and partners through social media. Thus, the internet alters many people’s long-term course of life. Similarly, the internet is an efficient way to share important nation or worldwide news. What used to be the job of newspapers, telegraphs, and letters is now the job of the all-encompassing World Wide Web. This use of the internet is valuable because it allows countries or specific individuals to be aware of what has occured in other parts of the world in order to offer support.

 Despite all these positive effects of the internet, several problems arose as well. For example, many teenagers now feel the effects of cyberbullying. On the internet, bullying is harder for adults to recognize, harder for teens to avoid, and harder for anyone to take action to stop. In addition to this problem often targeted against teens, the internet has caused a decline in physical activity in the general population. With the increasing amount of benefits of the World Wide Web, people spend more time online, and less time being active. This causes many health risks such as heart disease, obesity, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure.

“How old is Ellen Degeneres?”, “How many hours away is Atlanta from here?”, “When does Publix close tonight”, or “Why is the sky blue?” You have Berners-Lee to thank, because without him, you would not be able to learn these answers on a moment's notice.