Read the following passages carefully and answer the questions  given at the end of each passage:

In the decades that Otlet’s papers had sat gathering dust, his dream of a universal knowledge of network had found a new expression across the Atlantic, where a group of engineers and computer scientists laid the groundwork for what would eventually become the Internet.  Beginning during the Cold War, the United States poured money into a  series of advanced research projects that would eventually lead to  the creation of the technologies underpinning the present-day Internet. In 1990s, the World Wide Web appeared and quickly attracted a widespread audience, eventually establishing itself as the foundation of a global knowledge- sharing network much like the one that Otlet envisioned.

Today, the emergence of that network has triggered a series of dramatic - perhaps even “axial” - transformation. In 2011, the world’s population generated more than 1.8 zettabytes of data, including documents, images, phone calls, and radio and television signals. More than a billion  people now use Web browsers, and that number will almost certainly increase for years to come. In an era when almost anyone with a mobile phone can press a few keys to search the contents of the world’s libraries, when millions of people negotiate their personal relationships via online social networks, and when institutions of all stripes find their operations disrupted by the sometimes wrenching effects of networks, it scarcely seems like hyperbole - and has even become cliché - to suggest that the advent of the Internet ranks as an event of epochal significance.

While Otlet did not by any stretch of imagination “invent” the Internet - working as he did in an age before digital computers, magnetic storage, or packet - switching networks - nonetheless his vision looks nothing short of prophetic. In Otlet’s day, microfilm may have qualified as the most advanced information storage  technology, and the closest thing anyone had ever seen to database was a drawer full of index cards. Yet despite these analog limitations, he envisioned a global network of interconnected institutions that would alter the flow of information around the world, and in the process lead to profound social, cultural, and political transformations.

By today’s standards, Otlet’s proto-Web was a clumsy affair, relying on a patchwork system of index cards, file cabinets, telegraphs machines, and a small army of clerical workers. But in his writing he looked far ahead to a future in which networks circled the globe and data could  travel freely. Moreover, he imagined a wide range of expression taking shape across the network: distributed encyclopaedias, virtual classrooms, three-dimensional information spaces, social networks, and other forms of knowledge that anticipated the hyperlinked structure of today’s Web. He saw these developments as fundamentally connected to a
larger utopian project that would bring the world closer to a state of permanent and lasting peace and toward a state of collective spiritual enlightenment.

The conventional history of the Internet traces its roots through an Anglo-American lineage of early computer scientists like Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing; networking visionaries like Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn; as well as hypertext seers like Vannevar Bush, J.C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and of course Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, who in 1991 released their first version of the World Wide Web. The dominant influence of the modern computer industry has placed computer science at the center of  this story.

Nonetheless Otlet’s work, grounded in an age before microchips and semiconductors, opened the door to an alternative stream of thought, one undergirding our present-day information age even though it has little to do with the history of digital computing. Well before the first Web servers started sending data packets across the Internet, a number of other early twentieth- century figures were pondering the possibility of a new, networked society: H.G. Wells, the English science fiction writer and social activist, who dreamed of building a World Brain, Emanuel Goldberg, a Russian Jew who invented a fully functional  mechanical search engine in 1930s Germany before fleeing the Nazis;  Scotland’s Patrick Geddes and Austria’s Otto Neurath, who both explored new kinds of highly designed, propagandistic museum exhibits designed to foster social change; Germany’s Wilhelm Ostwald, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist who aspired to build a vast new ‘brain of humanity’; the sculptor Hendrik Andersen and the architect Le Corbusier, both of whom dreamed of designing a World City to house a new, one-world government with a networked information repository at its epicentre. Each shared a commitment to social transformation through the use of available technologies. They also each shared a direct connection to Paul Otlet, who seems to connect a series of major turning points in the history of the early twentieth-century information age, synthesizing and incorporating their ideas along with his own, and ultimately coming tantalizingly close to building a fully integrated global information network.