The question of "what is reality" and an off-line conversation with a friend who works in the internet community led me to think about the ground of our weblogs. How permanent will these musings be? I sent my URL to another friend to check out my site and he could not access it directly with only just my URL. However, if you put in the right words, you can call up certain discussions by using the google search engine. The easiest way to access my own blog and at the same time view other classmates' blogs is through the class blog. So the question arises in my mind, what will happen to our blogs and its connectivity after the course ends? Does it get archived away into some obscurity or will it be kept alive? How real is this reality?
Curious to know about how the dot.com bubble burst affected the personal lives of people involved, have also added to my sense of "how real is all of this?"
Then doing a search with google on how to construct a website with the objective of trying to find more ground for reality, I have been struck by how transparency must be inherent as a core value of the internet community. Without transparency, many tools initially designed to be useful can be manipulated. As in the case of the above google search, the first site listed actually used the word "free" to make money, while a lower ranking site actually contained more clear and simple information without the advantage-taking intention of the first. It seems to me that self-organizing qualities can be also be twisted to one's means. I think that not having clear values in the use of the internet was the main cause of the dot.com bubble burst.
As a websurfer, it seems that one must know very cleary what one hopes to find (the "signal"?) and not be distracted by the vast amount of information available ("noise"?, "interference"?). The websurfer must also develop some kind of crap detection skill to overcome the internet's limitation in that its reality is loose and not well grounded in Reality.
Discuss
No comments:
Post a Comment