What's so great about the web, that makes you say it is one of mankind's greatest inventions? I get that you think it is a "mirror of society," but is that very great? AFAIK, the web is mostly used to 1) browse memes and 2) get informed on new things to be outraged about. I'm genuinely curious what expectations you see the web as having "greatly surpassed."
Well that's an argument from ignorance if I ever heard one. Much of anything I've ever learned is from the internet ( e.g. Wikipedia, books, oddly specific youtube vidoes on car repair), and I'd have a much harder time in my career without the amount of material on Math/CS online. One can literally find top level educational material for free, whether from sources like MIT opencourseware or the many textbooks freely available. I'm sure other people have found great uses for the web too.
I suspect you're caught in a bit of a bubble.
In my experience, this is pretty uncommon though. I know only a few people that use the web this way, and a lot who browse the front page of reddit, watch whatever videos show up in their FB feed or on the front page of YouTube, etc.
The resources are there, but are they used enough to make my statement regarding what the web is mostly used for invalid? I don't know.
For the month of September 2018, OCW reported 1.09M unique visitors [1]. In their 2017 annual report, Facebook reported 2.13B monthly active users [2]. I suspect the comparisons between coursers, edx, udemy, etc and reddit, Twitter, memes, etc would be similar, and three orders of magnitude seems sufficient to say "most."
If you think your web use is typical, perhaps it is you in the bubble.
[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/about/site-statistics/monthly-reports/MI... [2]: http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/c826def3...
However, my comment was more arguing against what you said with the context in a previous comment:
"What's so great about the web, that makes you say it is one of mankind's greatest inventions?"
-I don't believe that an invention being used largely for unhelpful uses makes the (still large) amount of benefit any smaller. So, even if educational use is dwarfed by facebook, it's is still a wonderful tool for many.
I disagree, however, because my opinion is that the trillions of hours spent are not simply unhelpful (i.e. neutral) but actually damaging. My calculation is therefore that the net impact of the web is maybe negative, because the positives are swamped by the greater volume of negatives.
1. The web is one of mankind's greatest inventions: a mirror of society in a cyber world. It has greatly surpassed all expectations, and is The Highlight of the 20th and 21st centuries.
2. Fake news, hacking, foreign interference: nothing new under the sun. Democracy has major flaws which all governments take advantage of.
I understand where mr. Tim Berners-Lee comes from, but it feels so simplistic, even naive to propose something which various governments will not even read or comment on.
The true battle lies in changing society. Without overhauling democracy, we'll still be faced with voting issues. Without overhauling the press, we'll still get mass disinformation. And so on...