Heroes Wiki:Sandbox
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Information_at_your_Fingertips&action=edit SoPol – Hurley Briannon Schaeffer 4 ∙ 5 ∙ 09 Edit:Information at your Fingertips
Brief History
The idea of the internet was developed following the launch of Sputnik as the US’s way to regain technological superiority. It started as ARPAnet as part of the United States government. Computer technology was still in its infancy then, and the web wasn’t opened up to commercial interests until the late 1980s. At which point it started to open more and more. The most dramatic example is the web expanding from __________ websites at the start of Bill Clinton’s term to _____________ at the end. Now, while the concept of the internet has been around for more than half a decade, there have been two major developmental jumps as I see it. The first being with the creation of commercial and personal websites – the web grew tremendously during the 1990s. The next step came during the 2000s. This has been the increase in the number of blogs, social networking sites, and other things associated with user generated content. This paper is going to focus on the spread of information through the internet – the good that it can bring and the, of course, associated down side, to try and reach a verdict about information on the internet. Will the defendant Inter Net be found guilty of misleading the multitudes? Full coverage of the trial is available here in a Wikipedia-exclusive look into the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Case Briefing
The internet comes under fire frequently, being accused of having an incredible amount of incorrect information. This can be spread in a number of ways – through blogs, Twitter, email, social networking sites, or in the guise of respectable sites.
Definitions
Web 2.0
According to Tim O’Reilly, the man who coined the term “Web 2.0,” is best defined as providing “rich user experiences” which at the most basic level involve connections – connecting people with forums or social networking sites, but also greater degrees of synchronization between various segments of a person’s online identity, an increased acceptance of collective intelligence, and connections through development of open-source software.
User Generated Content
These are websites that, as the name suggests, allow users to created their own content. This can be videos, webpages, etc. The most notable example is Wikipedia or, for, video sharing sites, YouTube or Google Video.
Wiki/Wikipedia
A wiki is a very specific type of website that allows for collaborative editing. Anyone viewing the site can click the “edit” link at the top of the page and go to town. The most famous example is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the biggest encyclopedia in the world because it has almost no requirements for significance – if a person wants to write the article, they can. The average layperson, in addition to creating articles, can edit them any way they please. This causes concern to some people. Wikis can vary in specificity – for instance, Wikipedia may cover several topics fairly thoroughly, some topics benefit from additional, smaller wikis which can cover the topic with greater specificity. A noteworthy thing to discuss here also is “vandalism” – defined by Wikipedia as “any addition, removal, or change of content made in a deliberate attempt to compromise the integrity of Wikipedia.”
Blogosphere
A somewhat silly term coined to describe the collection of interlinking, interwoven blogs that various people/groups run. Some varieties can be Blogspot, run by Google, LiveJournal, which can have a variety of functions in addition to blogging, Twitter, a sort of micro-blog, or as professional as Huffington Post. Huffington Post is a collection of blog-pieces written by well known people in their field, like some members of Congress, think tanks, or otherwise.
A very specific blog style that allows for posts of only 140 characters. It’s very quick, but not terribly versatile. And the brevity can be good and bad. The power of Twitter is perhaps best exemplified with this cnn.com story following the Mumbai terrorist bombings of people using the site to send an average of 80 “tweets” every 5 seconds about what was going on and what hospitals needed blood donors
Social Networking Sites
As their name suggests, these sites are a means for people to meet other people, connect with people they already know, reconnect with old friends, keep in contact with people they might otherwise only meet once, and network for jobs or political motives. Certain sites are more focused on some things than others – LinkedIn, a popular site, is intended primarily for business connections, while Facebook or MySpace are more for fun/friends.
Personal Anecdote:Wikipedia
While the average person doesn’t have a Wikipedia page devoted to them, many (ok, probably most) celebrities do. These Wikipedia pages, due to their high profile, are subject to frequent vandalism. Sometimes said celebrity read his or her page – and of course he or she knows what’s true or false. The only, and very humorous, response I’ve seen about this is from Patrick Stump. He quips about the information on his pages that “apparently I'm bisexual and have like, twenty kids and that I learned everything I know from a sixteen-year-old who probably wrote that in himself,” but he doesn’t care about that, because “it is a gross omission to leave out my obsession with Prince.” He continues to states that he doesn’t care if you make him a transsexual, as long as the part about Prince is in. However, he humorously points out that, well, ANYONE can edit Wikipedia – like this sixteen year old who wrote part about himself in.
Negatives of this Free Flow of Information
Now, the way information is spread on the internet is through email, social networking sites, blogs, Twitter – all of these services take mere seconds to initiate, starting the propagation of one little piece of misinformation – which might have been harmless in their mind. And this information gets sent through the connections people have on email when each person forwards your misinformation to all their friends, and their friends, and maybe some people post it on their blog, and that blog gets read, and retweeted or reposted – you wind up having created a monster that’s spreading like a virus. This type of information spread, courtesy of these new types of media, is clearly cause for concern.
Recent Example
The way misinformation can spread quickly and easily, permeating the blogosphere can be hazardous to the democratic process. The case in point here is the
Random Stuff, ignore
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