Our Expierence of WWW

I’m going to completely admit that before this class I knew absolutely nothing about the WWW and Internet infrastructure. And honestly, it still confuses me. Who knew that the web and the Internet were different things? I thought they were simply interchangeable words, synonyms that could be looked up on Microsoft word. But they are different and when to my surprise when I click on Internet, there are no synonyms for it. It is it’s own thing. Which brings us to what John Udell was saying in class. When it comes to the World Wide Web, our imagination is our only limit. We decide what we want to make. Who we want to share it with and what we want it to mean. Take words for example.  Dackolupatoni: when you Google that, nothing comes up. But here is our experiment. Let’s search it in a few hours and probably this will come up. Which is recursion. And then that person can be linked to this. And it goes on and on. Now isn’t that cool?

In the book Berners-Lee states that “If you haven’t yet experienced the web, the best way to find out about it is to try it” Now isn’t that true (and also for pretty much everything). But it would nearly impossible to understand the web if you have never used it, never experienced the networks and seen its power. Which is why I think that there is still a problem as John said with realizing the difference between things in the physical world versus things in the virtual world. Maybe it is a generation thing. Maybe when the Clickerati are one of the other generations alive and everyone below them was born into a world fully immersed in the WWW, this distinction won’t be a problem. Like Julie said it is impossible to try to explain to our grandparents, sometimes-even parents, the purpose behind what we are doing on the web. Why we would possibly fb chat a friend instead of calling them. But I feel like once you truly discover the web, you can’t turn your back on it. So it will be interesting to see what happens when every generation has a knowledge of the web to some degree. Although there will probably be something new by then…

Another piece of our discussion that really caught my attention was the idea of ownership on the web. When you purchase a domain name you are essentially renting a url. I think that is interesting considering how every tweet has it’s own url. Why do we have to “rent” a url in some cases, but when it comes to twitter every single time we tweet, we create a new url. It comes down to advertsing. If the site uses advertising, you don’t need to buy it. But why would a site use advertising so that we get a free product? Because we are the product. What would facebook or twitter be without its users? Nothing. It needs us. We are facebook and twitter.

So maybe this reading wasn’t the most exciting for me, but without fail #vtclis12 developed an intriguing discussion from it that broaden my horizons and made me think.