Good morning, Doctor Google

Abstract

Thomas S. Kuhn perfectly describes the manner in which scientific knowledge is developed.1 Knowledge is not based on accumulation or on effort. It is not entirely reliant on one person or spawned on one specific day. Scientific revolutions occur by a process which involves the intervention of various people, facts and events which, if analyzed in isolation, might appear arbitrary or even insignificant. Attempting to identify the exact date when the paradigm shift occurs is futile. In this attempt to observe the paradigm shift which occurred in relation to the internet, it is necessary to start the discussion by referring back to the workings of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) at the beginning of the 1960 s, during the darkest days of the Cold War. It was based on the transmission of packets of information (Packet switching) via a closed network of independent nodes, without a central hub, so that the information flowing through the network was less vulnerable to the destruction of one node. In 1989, nearly 30 years after ARPANET, Tim Berners-Lee (1955) developed the World Wide Web, an application which permitted the sharing of files over the internet.2 The most important element of BernersLee’s contribution was that it allowed the free use of this design. But many could argue that this intervention did not