Our generation, and the ones after it, are really good at
taking things for granted. We were born into a world that has some amazing
technologies, like the World Wide Web. A
good chunk of people are just happy to have internet and revert to it for every
little thing they need, and most of those people have never really taken the
time to think about how all of that information, that we value so much, has
come to be and is so easy to access. There are a lot of people in younger
generations who don't even know what an Encyclopedia is or how to use the dewy
decimal system to look for a book. I think that it is important to understand
where the information you are using comes from, and how the internet itself came to be, which is why I found this article to be very informing and interesting.
When you think "World Wide Web, "hypertext,"
and "network," you would never think that their origins could go all
the way back to the 4th century B.C. and start off as stories that branch off
other stories that are all over the place, just like the internet. When I was
younger, I used to associate the web with a computer and think that they were
the same thing because I didn't know any better. In younger generations, kids
are starting to receive smartphones, tablets, laptops, ipods, and many more
advanced devices at such a young age that they don't ever need to understand
how to use other forms of looking up information, like the Encyclopedia.
Okay so back to the article. Vannevar Bush was a huge part
of developing a network that allowed us to reference a wide variety of
information in one single location. Even though his ideas were a bit ahead of
his time, he managed to come up with many ways to implement these ideas, which
other people continued to build on over the next 50 years. Even today people
are still building off these ideas and continuing to develop the web and all
the information that is available on it.
If you stop and think about it the World Wide Web is an amazing piece of
technology that has made so many other developments possible and is only going
to continue to grow as time goes on. Fifty years down the road, who knows what the internet will be able to do.
How does this shape your understanding of the www/Internet?
ReplyDeleteBefore, I was one of those people who thought that the WWW and the internet were one in the same and I didn't really think much about what the difference was or where it came from. After reading this article and listening to the discussion in class, I realize that there is much more to the internet and WWW than I originally thought. The internet is only the infrastructure and the WWW is where are the information comes from. People create websites with different information and store them on their servers that are connected to the internet and that is how people can access all of the different information out on the web. I've honestly never had to think about all of this information, but the more we talk about it and the more I learn about it, the more mind blowing it all is to me.
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