32 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
32 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
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---
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tags: [literature, socio-political, world-wide-web]
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created: Monday, November 04, 2024
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---
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# Weaving the Web (Berners-Lee, 1999)
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Tim did not really conceive of the possibility of the centralising and
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totalising effects of social media:
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_The Web's universality leads to a thriving richness and diversity. If a company
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claims to give access to the world of information, then presents a filtered
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view, the Web loses its credibility._ (p.143)
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_Happily, the Web is so huge that there's no way any one company can dominate
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it. All the human effort people and organisations have put in all over the world
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to create Web sites and home pages is astoundingly large, and most of the effort
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has to do with what's in the Web, not the software used to browse it. The Web's
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content, and thus value, will continue despite any one company's actions._
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(p.144)
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Apropos the "alt-right" etc:
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_The analogy of a global brain is tempting, because Web and brain both involve
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huge numbers of elements - neurons and Web pages - and a mixture of structure
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and apparent randomness. However, a brain has an intelligence that emerges on
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quite a different level from anything that a neuron could be aware
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of...[W]riters have contemplated an 'emergent property' arising from the mass of
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humanity and computers. But remember that such a phenomenon would have its own
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agenda. We would not as individuals be ware of it, let alone control it, any
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more than the neuron controls the brain._ p.222
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