The Internet and You.

Our Greatest Marvel

The web right now is of course subjectively one of the greatest marvels of modern technology. It allows for the possibility of everyone in the world to be connected. So borders are meaningless, different countries, governments and leaders don’t have the authority they used to. Information is posted and updated in seconds flat. We can use the internet to create movements that won’t be televised or mentioned by the new American bourgeoisie. Movements like the women’s march, the black lives matter movement and the candidacy of Bernie Sanders.  Not only has that but the internet as a whole has an undefeated market share. We use the internet now to watch TV, movies, get a cab, do our shopping, learn new languages, order food, to do our homework and even call our friends. None of this stuff was dreamed about before 1999. So would I say that Web 2.0 is living up to its hype? Yes of course I would. While we’re technically in Web 3.0 right now and possibly Web 4.0 depending on who you ask Web 2.0 completely revolutionized the internet and then the world. Has this new user generated content had its problems? Of course it has, everyone knows about “Fake News”. I don’t mean my dad calling me about how “Will Smith died I’m reading it on the computer right now”. But fake news in the sense of overly biased reporting and stories that are thrown out of proportion to feed a specific narrative. Windshield reports like dangerous stories like Breitbart trying to literally discredit global warming by reporting that the ice caps are increasing while 3% increased 97% of them decreased. No matter who you supported in this election you eventually saw ridiculous stories online from websites that weren’t credible that you or your friends believed because you just really hated the other candidate(s). Obviously this is very dangerous. Overall I think we just need to be savvy internet users and we can reap the rewards of the Web. What I think will happen with internet in the future is that we will continue to see things like google advertising where we see things personalized for us. I believe that cybercrimes will stay on the rise and we’ll have to stay vigilant in keeping ourselves protected. We will keep seeing the internet being easier to access and making our gadgets less clunky.  We’ll have very personal experiences.

 The History

In the beginning there was Web 1.0 and it was different, exciting and in retrospect the opposite of all of that. Web 1.0 was for a lack of better terms just the novelization of dial up. You could access different websites and they had information on them but that was it, as the viewer you simply just read what it had to say.  Web 1.0 was known as the “read only” version of the internet. Of course in a time where that was all you knew, it’s still a pretty amazing feature to have.  Suddenly you didn’t have to search through the library encyclopedias to find the information you needed you could simply log onto the web and type it in. According to flat world business the e-Shopping-Cart was technically a part of Web 1.0. Essentially what companies wanted to do was give their customers an overview of the products that they had. They also wanted their products to be available to anyone who could access the internet. However with the limitations of Web1.0 this trend would come later. In January 1999 the words Web 2.0 were first used by Darcy DiNucci in the Fragmented Future. DiNucci said that “The Web we know now, which loads into abrowser window in essentially static screenfulls, is only an embryo of the Webto come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we arejust starting to see how that embryo might develop. The Web will be understoodnot as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the etherthrough which interactivity happens. It will appear on your computer screen, onyour TV set your car dashboard your cell phone hand-held game machines maybeeven your microwave oven.” The term Web 2.0 was popularized by Harvard Grad TimO’Reilly and Dale Dougherty in 2004 when it was used at their O'Reilly MediaWeb 2.0 Conference. However technically title was first used by DiNucci. Web 2.0 marks a point when websites made a drastic change to user generated content. This allows for interactive and social media sites to be created. Websites like Myspace, Facebook and even Wikipedia are products of Web 2.0. However it’s important to note that Web 2.0 isn’t a change in the internet quality or of the internet just the way websites are made and thusly accessed. The passing of information being transferred is ubiquitous to Web 2.0 the online community network was created. With Web 2.0 timing in 1999 most houses now have houses with computers and maybe if you’re lucky two. The internet became an equalizer and suddenly everyone had a voice and their voice meant the same.