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Is The Internet American?

Posted on 27th February 2022

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I found this article on "The Daddest" recently while browsing Facebook. It contains some hilarious examples of ignorance and stupidity by Americans.

The author's position seems to be that, yes, some Americans are stupid, but that he himself is not; sadly not true.

Internet

This is a copy from the article of a social media conversation between an ignorant American and a better informed person from somewhere else (unspecified). The American states, correctly, that the Internet is an American invention; the final posting states, also correctly, that the World Wide Web is a European invention.

The author of the article demonstrates that he doesn't know the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web (the Internet is a communication network between computers, and the World Wide Web is a method of sharing and presenting information on those computers, which uses the Internet to access that information). The Internet was an invention of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense; the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee for CERN, so a European invention. The author "clarifies" that Tim Berners-Lee is an American, whereas as, in fact, he is British.

The idea that the units that one uses (in this case MPH) should be dictated by the inventor of the medium is laughable. That would mean that I should use KPH if writing something on Facebook using a browser (i.e. using the World Wide Web), but MPH if writing it using an App.