In the reading, I found it interesting that the shift to an information delivery model seemed like an end to the dream of a utopian internet. Originally Tim Berners-Lee saw his invention as “just another program,” but if Berners-Lee had decided to patent this idea, the Internet would be a different place then what we are so familiar with today. Instead, the World Wide Web became free to anyone who could make use of it. Because he and his colleagues agreed on a license free technology, people can see the same Web page as any other personal computer, system software or Internet browser, on their very own personal computer.
He originally wanted it to help achieve understanding. He imagined it to be a collaborative space where you could communicate through sharing information. The idea was that by writing something together, and as people continually collaborated on it, they could find mistakes and minimize misunderstandings. Tim Berners-Lee said, “There was a time when people felt the Internet was another world, but now people realize it is a tool that we use in this world.”
The internet has many fathers who developed other important components that make up the internet we are familiar with today. It was the contributing components from Berners-Lee’s and his colleagues which caused this shift. This collaboration helped them bring together the invention of the world wide web, with the system to let different computer networks interconnect and communicate, the creation of e-mail which included the use of the "@" symbol, and the coin of the term hypertext. This joined together with Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web with browsers, hypertext markup language, and uniform resource locators (URL’s) caused this shift which forced the creators to envision a different future with this system.
In Chapter 21 Douglas Rushkoff makes the distinction between communication and information. The distinction is that web browsers shifted the internet from a one-to-one communication, Berners-Lee’s original vision, to a one-to-many communication, the new vision after collaboration. He also makes it a point to insinuate that it was unintentional to go against what Berners-Lee originally imagined. Rushkoff talks about this as a kind of war and he takes the side of the communication as an interaction. He sides with the people not the programmers. He says the biggest problem is letting go of that need to control the message and just letting people take over.
I disagree with Rushkoff on this aspect because although there is information on the internet which is controlled, the internet is made up of much more than just that. If anything this shift has led us to be able to do anything we would like with the World Wide Web and to a much higher extreme than Berners-Lee could imagine when he first envisioned this system. Sites on the internet such as, Wikipedia, Blogs, and Social Networks, allow us to communicate on the internet through an information basis where we are able to collaborate and envision ideas just like Time Berners-Lee and his colleagues.
In Chapter 3, James R. Beniger also talks about the issue of control in cyberspace. He implies that cyber in cyberspace suggests a controlled space, although it is often characterized as decentralized. He worries about how much control we should place on cyberspace. He states that decentralization gives much more control over to the people which allow people to make paths for themselves instead of creating the paths for them. But cyberspace still remains an environment that attracts commercial and political exploitation and makes its users easy targets. With this in mind, as long as cyberspace is not a closed system, we will always seek to reserve the balance of this technological ecosystem.
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