We Are the Web
This August 2005 article summarizes the explosiveness of the Netscape IPO. A considerable length of the article goes toward showing how people’s initial predictions can be completely incorrect and what really happens is truly unpredictable. The great change that was brought about by the IPO was the impetus for a new online culture that was completely based on participating in the sharing of information and data, through hypertext.
A change occurred on the Internet, changing its motivation from being funded for research to a newly commercialized forum of data exchange as the NSF allowed e commerce in May 1995. Netscape stock flourished from its IPO, and the start of the revolution began.
The Internet is filled with many resources that are available for us to tap, yet it seems that we take it for granted that we have such a powerful tool at our disposal. This things became are, from thousands making their living through eBay Internet auctions to increase in Amazon.com customers supplying decent product reviews. Blogs are considered, also completely created with the supposed audience’s time and energy, with the benevolent intent to share information.
Interests of users have inverted from a decade ago toward more of a recreational service. BitTorrent offers near-symmetrical data transfer, assuming that its users will participate in uploading data. The article includes mention of a Machine (related to AI) that will eventually surpass the number of synapses in our brain. AI may be first realized in this global Machine rather than a supercomputer capable of several teraflops. The Machine is learning every time we click, at least that is the assertion. The author finishes surmising that we are at a crucial juncture in history that will be examined potentially centuries from now; definitely something to consider.
I thought the article was generally pretty interesting, especially the part considering symmetry of data flow. The question—“What happens when the data flow is asymmetrical”— is a good one. Who will “veg out” if everyone is busy contributing? That is a future that seems much more productive than our present and would definitely be very dynamic. I enjoy the present but I revel in the possibilities of the future.
5 comments:
It's hard to disagree, but, although I appreciate the conventions of new technologies and their implications, I do not regard them as the highest form of human achievement. It seems ignoble to compare a mass of wires and digital codes to the brain, which has always had a certain air of mysticism about it. Lockean scholars might say the brain directly analogous to a machine
*Cough* segue *cough*…
It reminds me of an episode of Futurama (yep) where there are "evil" brains that fly around the universe collecting information and data. The brains then decide to destroy the universe after they have collected all knowledge possible, so there won't be any new knowledge--the brains aspire to know everything. Anyway, they must also know and destroy themselves. A hefty metaphor with plenty of holes in it, but I hope you understand what I am getting at.
I made the connection between the title, "We Are the Web" and the idea thrown out by Kelly that we are getting to a point where we produce more than we consume.
There is one thing that struck methe most however, and I don't know that I believe it. Kelly suggested that in the near future, all of us on average will have written a song, published a book, produced a video, etc. etc. And I pose this question to everyone in the class. Is this a good thing? I am not afraid to admit that my song writing and video making skills parallel those of a preschooler. So does me making a video or producing a song do anything positive for humanity, or to steal a quote from Billy Madison, will we all be "dumber for having heard it?"
By Kelly suggesting this, isn't he also suggesting the idea that we are all as a human race going to average ourselves out, and there will be no more highly skilled or low skilled people at anything, we will all just be average at everything. If an A student and a failing student work together, wouldn't the outcome, more often than not, be a C?
To comment on what you are saying Dylan, I completely agree with your out look on the article. If what Kelly suggests does in fact come true I think the world will be dumbed down. Have any of you seen the movie Idiocracy? I commented on it at the beginning of the semester but I'm not sure how many of you actually looked at my comment on here so I'll explain again (for those of you who did read it, ignore me).
The movie is about an average man who works for the army. Because he is so average they decide to put him into an experiment because they wouldn't be losing anything special. They put him and a hooker into a chamber to sleep for what is supposed to be a year. The army ends up going down hill and no one wakes them up until 2015(I could be wrong on the date.. but I think that is right). By this time the world is so dumbed down by all the technology and media that has made their lives so easy, that this man is the smartest man in the world. Just as an example of how dumb this world is the number one tv show is a man getting kicked in the balls over and over again, The water crops with a gatorade like substance and can't understand why it doesn't grow, they even have fast food even faster (They push a button on a computer and out the food comes).
Any way, I think the world could be heading in this direction if what Kelly says is true.
Kelly is a reaching for some very important ramifications in this article. But are they valid? Is the internet an inevitable collective consciousness of the entire world's humans? If this is the case than movies like the matrix and Dale's Futurama reference seem all too plausible. There will be no reason to live outside of being connected to the internet, I am taking Kelly to the extreme with this. Kelly's view of the internet is a more narrow idea of what the internet could be. As he suggests ten years ago no one had ever thought we would be where we are with the internet. Ten years from now things that will have never been mentioned today will be. The internet could be one day so engulfing that many of the prophecies may come true.
But I don't agree.
The internet was initially for data storage, eventually it became useful for communication, from this it has grown to become a culture of many venues, video, audio, blogging (collections of discourse), etc. But will the internet so engulf our lives as to take us away from places of work, school, and our daily lives?
I maybe one of the short-sighted naysayers that Kelly goads ten years from now, but I don't think humans will ever fully remove themselves from their physical reality.
But I maybe wrong. . .(This feels ominous writing, I cannot imagine reading it-- I hope I don't blow anyone's mind).
I thought Kelly's article pretty intriguing, but it didn't occur to me that as we become "prosumers" we might be dumbing ourselves down. True, the quality of a lot of Internet content isn't exactly Academy Award quality, but, as Gurak et al. write, "blogs are more than mere tools for communiating online; rather, they provide new possibilities for the Internet as rhetorical space." Gurak's introduction makes a fairly convincing argument that there's a shift in how information is produced and disseminated because of the Web. I'm thinking of the changes in Internet access in terms of production and distribution of information, not of us getting smarter or dumber.
Some of what's happened in our recent history, such as the exposure of the Abu Ghraib abuses, is a direct result of our ability to record and publish. This seems to be an instance where we're getting smarter and we're also receiving better information.
I can't find the quote I'm looking for, but one of our articles talked about how much people like the do-it-yourself possibilities of the Web, about how much people enjoy this possibility. It's interesting to see how this impulse, combined with Internet access, is changing the way information moves.
I was really struck (perhaps because of my profession) by Kelly's asserting that in 10 years "the Web will be the only OS worth coding for." That seems very likely to be true to me, and yet in our department, which offers, perhaps, 150 classes a semester, we have only three computer classrooms, and I regularly see classes in those classrooms that do not make use of the computers. If it's true that the Web will be the only OS worth coding for, in ten years, what should our education look like now?
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