Interconnectedness and accessibility. That is what the World Wide Web is about, according to Tim Berners-Lee in his article “Long Live the Web.” We are all connected via the web, and every one of us has the ability to create and upload content on it for the whole world to see. Thanks to these principles, information has been made available on an unprecedented scale. No longer do we have to receive our information exclusively from the people we know and the institutions we subscribe to; in terms of being informed, you now control your own destiny. (As a side note, the previous sentence may be false; we might still be receiving all our information and having our worldviews shaped by the same people and institutions as we otherwise would be, just on a larger scale).
However, says Berners-Lee, the openness and accessibility of the web is being threatened by governments and corporations who want to restrict access to information and applications, in order to control what people know and use. It’s up to us – everybody, collectively, who supports the state of freedom the web currently operates under – to reject these attempts at controlling such a beautiful system.
The other side of the web, besides everything it contains and conveys, is the physical parts that comprise it – infrastructure, like cables and towers. In her journal entry/Atlantic magazine article “A Network of Fragments”, Ingrid Burrington talks at length about the fiber optic lines and cell towers she encountered during a journey across the United States. She explains how traveling across endless highways, you sometimes come across traces of the Internet’s physical counterpart, and how over time, these traces come together to form a much bigger picture.
What’s interesting to me is how both using the Internet, such as accessing a website or downloading a picture, and seeing small bits of its infrastructure represent the same idea: while it’s impossible for most of us to see the big picture all at once, we can come to understand it by seeing small snapshots of it, little moments that help us appreciate what’s holding it all together. It reminds me of human DNA: one single cell from a piece of skin can tell you a lot about the person’s physical traits, such as their height, hair color, body type etc. In a way, I suppose we do the same thing on a regular basis, such as when we talk to another person, we try to understand their personality – an infinitely complex and unpredictable thing – based on a few short interactions with them. Often enough we’re right, but sometimes we’re a bit off, or completely miss the mark. I guess Burrington’s article illustrates our fundamental way of trying to understand complicated things (which is most things) – piece by piece, rather than all at once.
That still doesn’t explain why I had to write this all in one hour, right before class.