September 3: Reading Reaction

Essentially the reading for this week dealt with, where does the Internet fall in retrospect to current mediums. When I say mediums I mean traditional outlets, television and radio as well as print. The tricky thing when attempting to classify the Internet is that it in a sense takes all the characteristics from all different mediums and different types of communication and infuses it together to form, well what we know today as the Internet.

Not only does the Internet try to reinvent what we know today as mediums but it is also eliminating certain problems that other communication has run into in the past. For instance in the reading it cites three issues, reliability, speed, and distribution. Now before I dig deep into these issues, first let me state that anything created by man is not perfect for man himself is not perfect. As a result the reliability regardless of the type of medium, Internet or not, sometimes things just go wrong. But in theory the Internet with its speed that is increasing ever more so every day, is allowing us to reach new heights and make the world seem ever so small. Granted the distribution system the Internet does have, enables us to receive items that if they were in the real world would otherwise be lost and end up creating headaches.

Alas the internet is an ever expanding entity that hungers for more and more information. The one amusing point in the reading was when the author spoke, "Most statistics about the Internet are more accurately labeled estimates, and by the time anyone reads this paragraph they will hopelessly be out of date, (pg 7)" which more or less is probably as I write this reaction.

The author for the most part had my abiding attention and for the most part I agreed with him, yet when it came to explaning how the Internet will always find a way past certain firewalls and boundaries to deliver its information, I am not sure the author knew about the "Great Firewall of China." But just as I said in the begining of this post, anything that is created by man is not perfect, and some information does get past, but only by those users who know the system well enough to use it to their advantage. Almost similar to those users who know how to navigate the web through its hypertextual interfaces in order to find what they are looking for, whether its for business or pleasure.

Even today with all of this talk about Web 2.0 and some people are even speaking on Web 3.0, to clasify the Internet just seems foolish in retrospect, it is almost like trying to classify the world we live in and why we are here to begin with...