I Have A Question

Who invented the Internet?

If you muttered "Al Gore" and snickered a little to yourself, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

Now then, let me clarify my question. I'm not too concerned with who first had the idea of uniting people around the globe through some sort of instantaneous higher communication -- obviously, it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who believed that we could be united not only across great distances but across great spans of time as well. All you had to do was die and become a part of the Oversoul. (Yes, I know: another great system hobbled by a bad user interface. It is a story as old and sad as Michael Dell. But we must press on.)

My question, I suppose, is really about web addresses. Specifically, about that little WWW prefix, which we all know stands for "Wild Wild Web," or something pretty close to that. It is a convention which must surely have been put in place by someone, and I can only assume that this "someone" was the inventor of the Internet. It might not have been; it could have been his girlfriend, or maybe his cat just got up on the keyboard and stood on the "w" key for a while, but there comes a point when one must stop speculating and act. I feel that the inventor of the Internet is my best bet, and so I am trying to find him. I want to ask him a question. I want to ask him why, when he was birthing this technological miracle child, he chose the words "World Wide Web" (there it is) to denote the "location" of the "sites" which would one day "reside" on/in/around...I'd better end this sentence before someone gets hurt.

"World Wide Web." Presumably the internet (whose name I am gosh-darn tired of capitalizing) was in its formative stages at the time. How did the inventor know it would be World Wide? Did he just assume? Was he the victim of delusions of grandeur that happened to come true? Or had a top-secret coalition of world leaders, stepping out from the shadows, enlisted his help to remake the world in their own image, promising him the souls and minds of their children in return? Did this "inventor" fellow know the future because he was writing it?

Basically, my little rant comes down to a single concern. When something takes the world by storm the way the Internet has, there is a sense of inevitability about the whole thing. Who decided that our lives were going to be shaped by a bunch of computers talking to one another? Was there a point where we could have said no? Were there people who did say no, and were never heard? Did anyone stop and think about whose best interests (if anyone's) were being served by this little e-volution?

I suspect that the answer is an old standard: the average person didn't think about anything except the bright shiny thing (It checks your spelling! It plays poker!) that was being dangled in front of his nose; a few philosophers objected, but they were easy to ignore and the ones that weren't were easy to shut up. That's just a guess, of course. I don't really know. But nothing in the world is truly new, no matter what the stickers on the Windows Vista package say.