An example of an ill effect of the Web that I have experienced is the walling of information. There have been multiple instances where I had wanted to read an article related to a paper that I am writing but I couldn’t directly have access to that specific article because I am not a subscriber of the specific website. In addition, living in China without a VPN means that I am disconnected from the rest of my life back in America because I am unable to use any western apps or go on western websites. Universality is the characteristic of being able to comply and work with any form of information and data. Having universality means that anything from a sentence to a series of numbers to pages of essays can be posted and shared on the Web for everyone to access. Isolation occurs between individual sites where the information that you post on one site cannot be reused and transferred to another site. The individual sites are walled off from each other. While the Web allows universality on the level of types of information posted, there is still isolation between these information in the forms of individual sites. Open standards are standards that allows anyone to contribute to the design of the sites on the Web. These standards are available for free on the Web for both developers and users and there’s no consent from anyone needed. Closed worlds are “worlds” separated from the Web where a specific link can only be opened by a specific program. The information shared in a closed world cannot be shared within the web. The Web is one of many applications that runs on the internet. The internet is an electronic network in charge of transmitting packets of information among computers according to some open protocols. Any application can run on the internet as long as it follows the Internet protocols. The author mentioned his vision of the “proliferation of smartphones” as a means of making the Web more central to people’s lives and he is absolutely right. Unlike computers, smartphones are a lot more handy and portable for daily uses and has become an essential of our lives. For some societies, smartphones function as a communications, entertainment, and payment device. I think the author will be in shocked at how humanity’s behavior and way of living has been improved and changed by smartphones. With the development of messaging apps people have started to refrain from the actual act of making phone calls. In terms of devising pages that works well on all screens, a good representation of that would be how we are able to open the same link from both smartphones and computers no matter the brand or size of the machines. Finally, linked data has been improved throughout the years. Nowadays we have large linked open data sets like DBpedia and Wikidata.
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