Kevin Han

Mr. Schillerstrom

Ideas That Changed The World

6 January 2011

 

Connecting the World

 

What is the most influential invention of the last two decades? It has been an exciting time for new technologies, with devices such as the smart phone, the plasma TV, and TiVo making their debut on the world stage. But one cannot change the content of the shows on television, and a smart phone without a web browser wouldn’t be very smart at all. The scope of all of these inventions pales in comparison to the influence of the World Wide Web, an invention that has affected the entire world in deep and irreversible ways. The World Wide Web has changed where we look to for knowledge, our methods of communication, and our means of commerce.

 

One of the Web’s major effects on society is in the area of learning and spreading information. Its focus on providing information is most clearly seen in its origin. Before the Web, the Internet was just a disparate collection of articles that required many different programs to access, one for e-mail, one for files, etc. In 1989, a physicist at CERN named Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to connect all of CERN’s computers under a standard in order to help physicists share scientific data (CERN). It later spread to another laboratory in California called SLAC, Berners-Lee made his web software available on the Internet, the number of web servers exploded, and the rest is history (de Angelis).

 

Today, information on almost every topic imaginable is made available mainly through Google and Wikipedia. Google is the “center” of the Web and provides a powerful way of managing the vast seas of information to find sites related to a specific topic. For this reason, it has become enormously popular, with almost 8 billion searches conducted in just one month of 2008 (5). Wikipedia also serves as an important source of information on just about any topic imaginable. It, too, is extremely popular, with more than 36% of American adults and 50% of those with a college degree saying they consult it for information (Rainee). Contrary to popular opinion, Wikipedia is actually a fairly reliable source of information: a 2005 Nature study found that an average Wikipedia article had just as many “serious errors,” such as a fundamental misunderstanding of a vital concept, as Encyclopedia Britannica (Giles). For smaller factual errors, Wikipedia averaged about four mistakes per article while Britannica had three. Wikipedia’s accuracy is about equal to that of a venerable, respected encyclopedia.

 

But information is not just provided by large institutions. The Web is still the property of the people - anyone can make a website and post anything they want on it. This has not been lost on the public at large, as we can see through Weird Al’s popular tune “White And Nerdy,” which contains numerous references to what used to be obscure aspects of the Web. Weird Al exclaims, “I got a business doing websites / when my friends need some code, who do they call? / I do HTML for ‘em all / Even made a homepage for my dog!” (Yankovic). This song really shows how the Web has been “opened up” to the public after its elite, specialized origins at CERN: a song about Myspace, editing Wikipedia, and coding HTML made it to the Top 10 on the Billboard Top 100. More people than ever are becoming tech-savvy and discovering how they can use the Web to share their pool of knowledge. Of course, the fact that anyone can make a website means that the quality of content may be debatable - one should still evaluate any new information on the Web with a critical eye, just as with any other source. However, there is no doubt that far more people are able to get their ideas out there than ever before because of the Web, which is certainly a good thing.

    Another big effect that the Internet has had on society, especially the younger generation, is the complete change in how we communicate in real-time. Millions of people are now conversing with others across the country or even the world using social networking sites like Facebook instead of in person or by phone. This shift in turn has led to both positive and negative effects. On one hand, social networking sites allow us to keep in touch with people physically far away quickly and easily. On the other hand, many believe that this virtual communication serves to actually isolate us from real emotional connection with others. Relatedly, information that people share about themselves could fall into undesirable hands, leading to privacy concerns.

 

A film that dramatically shows both of these troubling effects is We Live In Public, a documentary about the life of Josh Harris, Internet pioneer and founder of the first Web-based television network (Dalton). The film begins with Harris coolly saying goodbye to his dying mother via video message. It later describes an actual social experiment that Harris conducted with his then-girlfriend, in which he set up video cameras in every room of their house and broadcasted their lives online for anyone to see and comment on. The resulting tension caused him to break-up with his girlfriend and shut down the site. The director portrays Harris as a “victim of the Web,” a mentally unstable man who has trouble forming emotional bonds with people. His character throughout the movie and the opening scene in particular symbolize the disconnect the Web can cause with even our closest family members, and the unusual experiment shows what can happen when one is not careful with privacy on the Web, especially in the days when sites encourage you to share anything and everything.

 

Finally, the Web has exerted a big influence on how we buy and sell goods. Online marketplaces like Amazon, Craigslist, and eBay come to mind. eBay in particular exemplifies the change in attitude that comes with commerce on the Web. The book The Perfect Store: Inside eBay contains many colorful anecdotes of how eBay changed people’s lives in unexpected ways. From the woman who had to rent a warehouse to store the bubble-wrap she sold on eBay for a living, to the eBay staff members that gave equipment to a third-world village to help them sell goods online, eBay is a perfect example of how the Web can create new ways of selling and can aid those who would be unlikely to get their goods out there otherwise. The site Kiva.org also provides a similar example of how the Web can empower entrepreneurs that lack resources under a traditional system. It allows people to lend money directly to entrepreneurs in poorer nations, featuring profiles of each business and amount left to be lent on the site. Using Kiva, a self-employed silk weaver in Cambodia named Khin Mok was able to get his business going using a $500 loan (Fish). He is just one of many people that Kiva helped using the openness and accessibility of the Web to attract lenders and borrowers alike. We can see that the Web has led to a great degree of innovation in business and has aided businesspeople in novel and unlikely ways.

 

However, the Web has an extremely negative side for business that is best demonstrated with an example. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano is not ostensibly about the Web, but it is possible to apply its dystopian view of the future to the Web. In Player Piano, America is run by machines, and society is split into the elite minority of brainy managers and engineers, and the useless lower class, who all have unnecessary make-work jobs. Although everyone in this society is physically satisfied, with national health care and comfortable living conditions, Vonnegut shows how this is not enough to make people happy. The main character, Paul, says to his wife, “in order to get what we've got, Anita, we have, in effect, traded these people out of what was the most important thing on earth to them - the feeling of being needed and useful, the foundation of self-respect” (Vonnegut 197). The rapid movement online of many businesses and services parallels this trend. Stock brokers and travel agents are no longer needed, replaced by stock-trading and travel websites. Customer service is frequently done by an automated system with automated messages, instead of even a hand-typed e-mail. Imagine what it’s like to have your entire career, something you’ve trained years for, done by a website that can serve millions of requests a day. The unprecedented loss of personal service that came with the Web, coupled with the obsolescence of careers typical of any increase in mechanization, has caused many to feel the sentiment expressed by Paul in the novel.

 

Overall, the Web has led to many dramatic shifts in society in the areas of information sharing, communication, and business, among many others. These have had both positive and negative impacts: information of generally good quality is freely and widely available, social websites have led to both increased connection and disconnection, and business has experienced innovation as well as dehumanization. The Web has also underwent many changes itself, morphing from a exclusive scientific resource to a worldwide network connecting billions. Two things are certain, though - the Web is here to stay, and it is up to us to determine how it will affect future generations.



 

Works Cited

 

"ComScore Releases July 2008 U.S. Search Engine Rankings - ComScore, Inc." ComScore, Inc. ComScore, Inc., 21 Aug. 2008. Web. 29 Dec. 2010.

 

Dalton, Stephen. "The Rise and Fall of Josh Harris? The Twitter Generation’s Voice from the Bunker - Times Online." The Times | UK News, World News and Opinion. The Times, 17 Oct. 2009. Web. 29 Dec. 2010.

 

de Angelis, Gina, and David J. Bianco. "CHAPTER SEVEN: Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web." Computers: Processing the Data. 106. Oliver Press, 2005. Science Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 29 Dec. 2010.

 

Fish, Tim. "SCHOOL 2.0." Independent School 68.2 (2009): 80. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Web. 29 Dec. 2010.

 

Giles, Jim. "Internet Encyclopaedias Go Head to Head." Nature 438.7070 (2005): 900-01. Print.

 

Rainie, Lee, and Bill Tancer. "36% of Online American Adults Consult Wikipedia." Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. Pew Research Center, 24 Apr. 2007. Web. 04 Jan. 2011.

 

Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. New York: Dial, 2006. Print.

 

Welcome to Info.cern.ch. CERN, 2008. Web. 29 Dec. 2010.

Yankovic, Weird Al. “White And Nerdy.” Lyrics. Straight Outta Lynwood. Volcano, 2006.



 

Connection, entertainment, business, promotion

 

Topic: The World Wide Web

 

The World Wide Web connected people around the world, allowing instant communication among everyone with Internet access. Now people can access the world’s information at the click of a button and talk with people they’ve never met on the other side of the world. It has changed the way we shop, study, communicate, and do business forever.

 

Yankovic, Weird Al. “White And Nerdy.” Lyrics. Straight Outta Lynwood. Volcano, 2006.

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=cMEoZu122J4C&pg=PT197&lpg=PT197

 

(1) http://info.cern.ch/

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20080507164451rn_2/news.scotsman.com/cyberslacking/Net-abuse-hits-small-city.2460438.jp - entertainment

 

(3) de Angelis, Gina, and David J. Bianco. "CHAPTER SEVEN: Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web." Computers: Processing the Data. 106. Oliver Press, 2005. Science Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 29 Dec. 2010.

 

(Giles) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html

 

(5) http://searchenginewatch.com/3630718

 

(6) http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6877690.ece

 

(7) Fish, Tim. "SCHOOL 2.0." Independent School 68.2 (2009): 80. MasterFILE Premier. EBSCO. Web. 29 Dec. 2010.

 

 

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=51671612&site=ehost-live - business

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/15/top-10-computer-novels

 

http://idolator.com/5259602/idolators-top-12-pop-songs-about-the-internet

 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/153368/the_best_and_worst_movies_about_the_internet.html