Category: Ann Chen

Besides Berners-Lee’s article “Long Live the Web”, I chose to read Burrington’s “A Network of Fragments”. These two readings both discuss the features of the present Web, presenting me with new understandings.

 I’ve been confused by the concepts of the Web, the Internet, and Networks, and thought of them as the same thing – the so-called online state. From I learned that the Internet is an electronic network providing an environment for the Web, an application, to run. In fact, we are so accustomed to living with the Web today that we always follow its trends unconsciously without recognizing the changes they brought to our lives. I want to highlight here is the openness of the Web. As Berners-Lee states, universality and decentralization have become key features of the Web and are indispensable for its future development. Internet connections are usually easily accessible, enabling anyone to message others anywhere and anytime. One thing that Berners-Lee mentions that strikes me is, “the Web is yours”. Indeed, as long as one is connected to the internet, he or she can equally access and use the resources. I read about some papers discussing people’s identities and the common psychology when negotiating self and others, and learned that people’s identities are usually socially constructed and varies among environment. We tend to behave in the way that corresponds to the image we built previously when interacting with that group of people, revealing parts of our personalities and intentionally cater for their expectations for us. Different from the reality, where our codes and behaviors are affected by our multiple interpersonal relationships, we can choose to anonymize and reconstruct our identities. We can behave more freely, and easily escape the responsibilities — simply by cutting off the network connection. Therefore, we can create more things that we want with less considerations to others’ opinions about our identities in this open environment. However, being open and decentralized doesn’t mean there are no restrictions. As a kind of medium, the hidden messages of the Internet encourage certain behaviors and affect our habits. For instance, the instantaneity of online information changes the way we communicate. We tend to send short and direct messages, cutting full sentences into pieces, and using emojis instead of words to describe our emotions. Different Webs, such as different social media websites, also have their own encouraging style, such as Instagram’s preference for picture sharing and Twitter’s for small pieces of words and news. Moreover, hierarchy still exists on the Web, and wealth and power can be largely exaggerated. Moreover, as internet companies pursuing profits, they will certainly try to raise the conditions to gain access to their websites.

Another idea I want to further discuss is the value of data-sharing. Although it feels like that our identities on the Webs are virtual, we are constantly being tracked. I once browsed a website which can record the move of our censors once we log on to the page, and I was shocked about how the Webs capture and analyze our data so accurately all the time. In fact, more and more Webs are asking for our personal information in order to enlarge their data base. I know that these data are valuable, but never thought in depth why and how they are useful until reading about Berners-Lee’s discussions on the value-added service of sharing personal data. I learned from his article about how information is stored and shared within and between sites, and realize that, in my daily life, by clicking “log-in with Google” or “log-in with Facebook”, which I often do out of convenience, I am actually isolating my information to Google or Facebook. I realize that accessing information is different from possessing them, especially for companies, that also explains why many sites limits our access to its contents when log-in with an existing personal account on other websites or apps. I believe it is important to find the balance between sharing data and maintaining the universality of the Web.

Finally, being open and universal, the Web functions crucially as a public space. As Berners-Lee describes, a new trend of using the Web is as a “public machine” where people get information from others’ reviews and ratings. The mass collaborates to contribute to the Webs, altering the authority from the experts’ words to the majorities’ views.

I personally am excited about the future of the Webs. As predicted by Berners-Lee, the basic principles for the Web in the future will basically remain the same, while its trends and functionalities will surely develop greatly.

In Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web, he made a very interesting point on the difference of using HTTP as an open standard system and using iTunes as a closed standard system by Apple. He thinks that the closed worlds are not going to grow as much as the open worlds, and says “If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.” However, many evidences have pointed out that since Apple as a company expanded its business, many software developers are developing softwares for iOS and MacOS systems besides the ones compatible to the Windows system.As a result, there are more applications in the iTunes realm. Also, Apple has expanded its acceptance to the Web which uses HTTP instead of iTunes so there are more people in its target market.

In both Tim Berners-Lee’s Long Live the Web and Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, the idea of violation of Internet citizen rights are discussed to a great length. This topic is very controversial since the day of the birth of Internet and the World Wide Web. Both authors tried a different approach to explaining this phenomenon.

In his article, Berners-Lee viewed the violation through his explanations of the basic terms which forms the Internet as we know it today. Firstly, he claimed that the Web is an online location where free speech is protected. Then he said that the Web is where people practice free speech the most, and that universality is a huge factor in how people use the Web globally. However, many countries are trying to prevent the uses of what they call improper usage of the Internet. In Berners-Lee’s words, there are no improper uses since the Internet or the Web is the main medium for freedom of speech nowadays. In Ingrid Burrington’s The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud, he dedicated the majority of the article to the discussion of human rights on the Web. He gave the example of Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom’s data storage and the access of data from these two storages. Of course, the example was talked about by Burrington through the two companies’ perspective and especially the U.S. perspective. However, from this part, there are questions which rose up of how would the data center of Deutsche Telekom be different from Microsoft when it comes to the data usage in building private digital profiles of people and its harms and benefits from the global citizen perspective. This is a very interesting point since he also talked about other companies like Amazon and Alibaba, which still the same questions remain.