Reading Reflection
After Reading the article Long live the Web by Tims Berners-Lee, who invents the world wide web, I do learnt a lot about the web and also a lot to talk about.
First, after learning the beneficial and ill effects of the web, I did reflect on my own life, and found some example that is helpful for showing these effects.The web is a marvelous tool for academic research. With the web, we can easily get access to most of the journals, newspapers, and other materials from our home. We don’t need to go to the library and view through hundreds of books to find the article or the knowledge we want. As universality being the foundation of the web, all kinds of information can be found on the web, thus making it much more easy to get the knowledge of the area I am searching. For ill effects, snooping is the most annoying one. I remembered one time a typo occurred and I searched “High heel” when I was actually trying to search for the artist Gauguin(their pronunciation in Chinese is the same), then I keep on seeing recommendation and advertisements of different kinds of heels when I enter different apps on my phone, especially those online shopping apps. It’s obvious that what I searched was snooped and shared with third party for personalized advertisement, which make me really unhappy and worried.
Universality means the web should be accessible for everyone everywhere, any kind of information in any form can be shared on the web with the help of technologies like URI. Isolation means the opposite: some information of a certain website is impossible or hard to access from other website, and the information posed on some websites are restricted.
Open Standard means Every committed expert have the chance to design how the web should be like and be reviewed by others the whole process should be free, also, everyone should be able to create their own website permission from a certain organization, closed world does the opposite, the information there are only accessible on these websites, and they are only known and innovated by the company creating them. Apple is one typical example of closed world: we may find apple operation system is easy to use, but it’s hard to add certain apps we really want but is not available in the “App Store”, bringing a lot of inconvenience.
For me, web is a system that enables information transmits within it. And the Internet is a platform, where we can connect different web to it and let them connect with each other. Webs can function without the Internet, but they can be much more powerful with the help of the Internet.
We’ve achieved great improvement in three aspects of the column “Future in Action” of the article. We can know combine different information together to help our life, which is now applied nearly everywhere in our life. Social Machine is prosperous nowadays, we have WeChat, Twitter, Tik Tok, Youtube and all kinds of platforms, everyone can easily pose their thoughts and masterpiece on the web so that everyone can see them and comment on them. For Web science, Big data analyzing is the best example, it collect massive amount of information and process it, as it covers nearly all of the date, so it do succeed in shaping the world. Free bandwidth is developing greatly, but it’s still not universal. There are also new problems including deep fake, information leak and loss of privacy, which are all side effects of the great development of web. Because of the universality, all kinds of information can be spread, helping deep fake spread. Also, due to open standard and universality, leaking and loss of privacy are happening from time to time.
All in all, the web do changed our life greatly, and we sincerely hope it to be better. Long Live the Web.
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