Comm 203: The Web at 20

The most salient point in this article is that the Web "as we know" it is being threatened in a lot of ways and we need to preserve it with our human rights. It is basically saying that we, as humans with rights to use the web, should care because it has become an important resource in our world. We need to make the web more valuable by using it correctly. The threats to the web's universality are the most recent. Social networking sites like Facebook, Linked-In, etc. are valuable because they store so many bits of important information such as who is who in a picture, birthdays, likes, and email addresses. But it is only within these sites that you can access this data. You cannot use this data because the site blocks off other websites from accessing the same data because it is "walling them off." "You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site." It is saying that social networking sites become central platforms for locking you into that website once you've entered bits of information. This, therefore, makes the internet vulnerable to becoming fragmented. The drive to preserve the principles of the web is basically what this article is telling us to do. We also need to have legal standards to preserve our privacy within the web since linked data confronts problems in that sense. We as web users need to preserve the web as it is so that our future generations will be able to use it and create even better things with it.