The author mentions some beneficial and “ill effects” of the Web. As for me, beneficial effects are mostly shown as the web connects people from entirely different places and social circles. For example, China re-released Lord of the Rings this year, and fans gathered through the web to organize various viewing events. I personally was very lucky to attend five of them. And almost all the people I met and became friends with in these events were strangers that linked to me only through web. As for the ill effects, disclosure of private information is the major one. What often happens is that I say something or see something in real life, and then when I open Taobao, that thing is recommended to me. This is evidence that the web is stealing my voice and image information. Fortunately, I haven’t run into any serious private information leaking problem, but I heard that some people have had their photos that were posted on websites stolen and used in scams.
Reading Response: Long Live The Web
To me, universality is that everyone can access or publish any information of any kind by any means. Isolation is that information or data is only stored in one site and cannot be fully accessed from another site. I think the difference between the two is that in universality the data is fully mobile and shared, while in the isolation the original data would have been stored at one site and exported to other sites in another form. It reminds me of the music website I’m using. When I want to share a song on WeChat, I can only share a link that will lead the user to the music website to listen to the song instead of sharing the original file of the song directly to WeChat.
Open Standards mean users can use the site without anyone’s permission and without paying for it. The standards are also open for editing, publicly reviewed, and accepted by the public. Closed Worlds are worlds that the site does not give users a choice but create an isolated environment so that information inside and outside the environment is not directly interoperable. The core difference between the two, I believe, is whether the user is given the chance to choose and whether the user has complete freedom in using the site. One thing I’m not sure about is the part of the right to choose. The author says “The point is that open standards allow for many options, free and not（83）.” So if a site allows non-payment choice, but drastically restricts access, even to the point of threatening the most basic rights, is that still meet open standards?
The Web is an application or a collection of data. The Internet, on the other hand, is the electronic network that transmits webs or packets of data among various devices. And the two can be run and remodeled separately, but in a way that affects each other. For instance, the wider and faster the Internet is, the more users and more active activity there may be on the webs and therefore faster growth.
When we look at the Web today, I think some of the author’s vision is present. Open data is commonly used today, especially on map apps, as people can get instant traffic situation through open data. Social machines are also well developed. Speaking of China, there’s a variety of rating websites for different categories (food/movie/entertainment…) and social platforms (drawing /handicrafts…). Through detailed categorization, the web is reaching out more and more to different groups and facilitating more communication on a large scale. There’s probably discussion about web science too, such as discussion about fast-paced era, which is part of the effect that web has on society. And I think free bandwidth is definitely better spread as technology improves.
For my web environment (China), the idea of linked data both materialized and failed. There’s no denying that there are many sites that share data with each other, users can log in to another with one site’s account and share the same name, avatar, contacts and other data, which is very convenient in China where most software requires real identity to use. However, in some areas, linked data is very inadequate. For example, there are many movie and TV broadcasting sites, each with different movie and TV resources. Therefore, when users have more viewing needs, users need to become members of several sites at the same time, while there’s no unified shared platform to complete the viewing needs at once. The same is true for music sites. That’s where needs improvement. And to balance between isolated data and monopoly while improving.