One of the readings from this week, Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, really got me thinking about what the internet really is. I don’t think it’s a really tangible thing, like a book, so it’s more difficult to describe. Like a book, it has pages. But the pages aren’t printed on paper, they’re…codes that create visual and interactive effects on a screen? I picture the internet in my mind as an endless circle of pages, constantly scrolling and changing. You can select pages, and move through them using links, like endless strings connecting the pages in the middle of the circle. When the strings get tangled, pages have technical bugs. (Haha.) Imagining how to describe this gives me the same feeling of being challenged as I got the other day when a blind customer came into the jewellery store I work at looking for a new necklace chain for her pendant (you try bringing out different chains and teaching someone that can’t see to unclasp it!). I felt challenged and was at a loss for a way to describe it.
Weinberg uses several examples to bring about his point of the oddities of the internet in our world. There’s the boy who makes a threat on Columbine High School after the shooting happened and ends up in jail. Hiding behind a screen name and an ‘alias’ gave him the sense of being in character. Then Weinberg moves on to the young woman and the judgements you make on her based on her page. It’s much the same thing as deciding whether to read a book based on the cover art and back cover description. Will I be friends with this girl? Do we have anything in common? Do I agree with her views on life? Maybe I don’t like her. I’ve never met this person, but I’ve already drawn my own conclusions. The same thing happens in Weinberg’s eBay scenario. In his quest to find the perfect quilt, he makes judgements based on the sellers notes and screen names, and the photos of the quilt. He even says, he may have missed the deal of the century. But he didn’t take the chance.
What kind of chances do we take on the internet every day? What kind of impression do we put out online every day? This book was written in 2002, 12 years ago, so is it even relevant anymore? Or is this book more of a preface to what we live with everyday, ‘the norm’, today?
