📚 Week 03 Reading Response 📚

The two readings this week were very thought provoking and have caused me to seriously question my own usage of the internet and technology itself. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” though written in 1945, was very much so relevant. Bush argues that men have always used science and machinery as a means for destruction and violence, only seeking to enhance man’s physical prowess. And yet, it is our inventions that should be empowering our minds and that science needs to be more about “making moire accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.” Moreover, Bush goes on to predict the perils of mass production noting that “the world has arrived at an age of cheap, complex devices of great reliability; and something has bound to come of it.” This was 1945. We are in 2020. This could not be more true; we place so much value in trying to progress and build more, do more, be more. Yet, we are not recognizing the consequences of using so many resources and how it affects every living creature on this planet. Bush was right to state that man needs more time reviewing “his shady past” as we are only creating more problems with production and it has come to the point where human advancement can’t keep sweeping things under the rug. Our problems have accumulated to a detrimental amount. And so we “may perish in conflict before [we learn] to wield that record for [our] true good.”

In terms Tim Berners-Lee’s essay “Long Live the Web” a lot of problems were being posed about the accessibility and monopolization of the World Wide Web in 2010. That was a decade ago. I imagine these problems have worsened immensely and maybe even irreparably. I did not even realize how much big tech companies and social media platforms are segmenting the web and really monopolizing it. Our governments are failing us from nation to nation as the web becomes an increasingly more lucrative space, such that greed gets in the way of our freedom to access a public space. I do think there needs to be more reform and laws implemented around data collection and overall internet usage, because it has become such a huge, huge!!! facet of our global society, that there must be more regulation to protect such a public space.