Reflection on the ‘Long Live the Web’

  As far as I am concerned, the foundation of the Web, which is the universality, is actually a double-edged sword. On one hand, it makes everyone accessible to creating their own websites and sharing whatever they want with other web users. It does bring great convenience and innovation to our daily life. With this feature, we can gain tons of information posted on the Internet and maybe we can use big data technology to turn the information posted on the web into more useful and meaningful ones. Like the author mentioned later in the text, the drug discovery to combat Alzheimer’s disease is based on this feature.

  On the other hand, anyone can post any information on his own web, which makes it very hard to tell the fake ones from the real ones. For those who aren’t able to tell the difference, it could be extremely dangerous. Imagine that a patient is looking for the cure on the web, he can get lots of symptoms describing which sickness he got. But none of them is accurate enough and without being examined in the hospital, it’s difficult for him to find the real cause of the disease and use the related drug. In the worst condition, he might trust some fake information and due to the delay in the curing process, he might even lose the chance of being saved. So from this perspective, it seems that the world needs to come up with an organization, whose power is beyond national government, to govern the web world as a whole, so that the web can be beneficial to human beings.

–Johnny