World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked in The New Scientist him what he hopes to achieve.
“Web science is already happening. People are studying the effect of the web within disciplines like social science, economics, psychology and law. Our Web Science Research Initiative aims to bring that research together. There are converging web-related issues cropping up, like privacy and security, that we currently have no way of thinking about. Nobody has thought to look at how people and the web combine as a whole – until now.”