1. My Own Experience With the Benefits And Ill Effects Of The Web
- The author mentioned that the web enables everyone to share information and people can access information from anywhere and anytime.
As a Chinese student, I am taking an EAP class this semester about Rock and Roll music. To complete research and make presentations, I need to search about rock and roll music and history online. Through the internet, I could access music videos from decades ago, and I could get tons of information by reading through Wikipedia and some other websites.
- The internet has made it easier for people to communicate with each other.
I have a brother currently studying in the US. Back then when the internet and smartphone hadn’t been widely used, the only way for people who don’t live near each other to communicate is by writing letters. However, we could send messages and receive them in less than a second.
2. Concepts
- University and Isolation
The word university in the text means the World Wide Web should be accessible and usable by anyone, regardless of their where they are, what language they speak, or what device they use.
The word isolation means a set of data that is not using a URL that could be only used on one site. When accessing another website, the data cannot be shared.
The universality is the ideal overview of the Internet, it describes a web where the information for users is equal and open. However, the word isolation is what the reality looks like, for financial interests, people are monopolizing information.
- Open Standards and Closed Worlds
The word Open Standards refer to a set of technical specifications and protocols that are freely available to anyone, and it allows different devices to communicate with each other.
The word Closed Worlds means a fictional world in that only a small group of authority people could have access to information and websites. The closed world is just a way to control people and restrict their creativity and productivity.
I do not have a chance to view foreign websites before getting to NYUSH. I was using Baidu before, and I thought that was all a search engine could do. However, after using Google search, I found that there is a lot of progress comparing Google search to Baidu.
- The Web and The Internet
The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers and servers that allows information to be exchanged and shared across the world, whereas the Web is s specific application that runs on top of the Internet. The Web is a platform to share information on pages, which are linked together by hyperlinks and can be accessed using a web browser.
3. The Future
The author’s vision of the future web is a more collaborative and open place where people could have access to all kinds of information. Companies are no longer monopolizing information. Thus, sharing, thinking, and creating, the collaborative web can accelerate enormous industries.
Besides, the author also mentioned the privacy issue brought about by the development of the web. The leakage of private information is an imperative problem in the process. Our goal is to build a future web with collaborations, accesses, and privacy.
Even though many people have been working on the idea of collaboration and accessibility of the web, they are still problems nowadays. A lot of big companies are still trying to monopolize people’s information and they are not willing to share. For instance, one of the most dominant music companies in China, QQ Music, once monopolized some most popular pop songs, and it forbid users to listen to those songs using other apps. Nevertheless, the law has forbidden it to do so.
Besides, how to make the internet a private but sharable place also remains to be solved.