The Virtual Revolution
The series was announced on 10 July 2009, under the working title of "Digital Revolution", to examine the impact the World Wide Web has had on society over its first 20 years. Technology journalist and academic Aleks Krotoski would present. The series was launched with an event at the BBC to mark the twentieth anniversary of the World Wide Web, which saw Tim Berners-Lee (credited with inventing the World Wide Web), Susan Greenfield, Bill Thompson and Chris Anderson discuss the World Wide Web.
Global brain
Although some of the underlying ideas were already expressed by Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century and were written about by many others before him, the term “global brain” was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book "The Global Brain". How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986. The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by Gottfried Mayer-Kress in 1995, while the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996.