Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software consultant working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside of Geneva, Switzerland. On March 13 of that year, he submitted a plan to management on how to better monitor the flow of research at the labs. People were coming and going at such a clip that an increasingly frustrated Berners-Lee complained that CERN was losing track of valuable project information because of the rapid turnover of personnel. It did not help matters that the place was chockablock with incompatible computers people brought with them to the office.
Today, the scheme proposed by Berners-Lee would be called an intranet. In the present, the world-wide-web is a much different system than was originally envisioned at CERN. Information storage, which Berners-Lee wanted to create, has become almost a byproduct of concerted efforts to satisfy people's demand for information and entertainment.
The problem he identified then remains largely unsloved . Social networking moves us closer to a solution because it focuses on social roles, rather than information.
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