After reading the Time Magazine's article about the new Web 2.0 I have a few reflections. The article talks about the development of the new web and the dissemination of information across this infinite medium.
"And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software."
The new web has been a unique medium to express our creativity, our ideas, our thoughts and share them with everyone and anyone. With this new web we can also spread information quickly- almost as it is happening. News around the world, the earthquake in Haiti, the 9/11 attacks, are being reported not only by the media, but by the people as they are happening. We are not just the consumer of media anymore, but the producers and distributors of the media. As I did some research on fandom, or fan communities, I found a lot of information that showed how fans express their participation in fan communities online and how it is much more possible to be an extreme fan in today's society because of the flexibility and ease of spreading information through the internet to others.
"But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion."
We're still exploring how the internet is impacting our communication with others. Is it helping communication by making quicker connections through email, Skype or blogs? Or does the computer and internet distract us from real life happening around us? It's still a social experiment, how do we use our capability to communicate with millions? There's no road map to the internet, so how do we explore the endless possibilities and share them with others?
Just as blogs are an interesting development that have us writing to the world wide web- not with a specific reader in mind. The web has us posting, publishing and spreading information but do we know who is using this information? It's great to explore this new development and spread information to the world wide web but we should also keep in mind our audience and how this information can help those that find it.
To read this whole article, it is available at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
No comments:
Post a Comment