REFLECTION

I found both of the articles pretty interesting. O’Reilly’s description of Web 2.0 as a gravitational core made sense to me, as websites exist on a spectrum of capabilities and not all of them do the same things. However, Web 2.0 means that these websites follow some similarities in principles and services. The innovation and changes brought about by Web 2.0 is significant. It expanded the internet and brought it to a larger group of people and made things a lot more accessible. However, there are negatives to the advent of Web 2.0, which was the corporatization of the web. This leads into Fuchs’s article about surveillance, where he discusses how corporations manage data in the modern age. While it is useful to give some data in order to receive certain services, it is also hurtful in that companies will use that data to exploit and surveil users for economic benefit. We should definitely be more weary in the age of internet data sharing and how it can be misused by greedy corporations. Fuchs brings up the point that we need to imagine and start creating alternatives to these corporations and I completely agree. This makes me think of open source software and how it is corporation-free and managed by the users. It would be another great turning point when open source is more applicable to web services directly.