Seek Find Be

I suppose web 1.0 was all about information output. Web 2.0 denotes a two way street of information. New York Times journalist John Markoff describes web 3.0 as the intelligent web. Also known as the semantic web, wikipedia claims web 3.0 will include tools such as “Resource Description Framework (RDF), a variety of data interchange formats (e.g. RDF/XML, N3, Turtle, N-Triples), and notations such as RDF Schema (RDFS) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL), all of which are intended to provide a formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.”

Three things are noteworthy in all of this: (1) I don’t know where the web is going, I’m not sure where we are right now and the future of digital products and their marketing hold great satire potential.

(1) Where are we going? I never understood how a record player worked and don’t have the faintest idea what web 3.0 will be all about. Friends assure me that it will feed me warm meals and mange my relationships while I sit at my laptop.

(2) Where are we now? To study the digital divide, I spent a few minutes looking at homeless bloggers, which leads me to this question for the following bloggers: Which side of the digital divide are these folks on?

Anya Peters’ story, know as the wandering scribe, demonstrates the socially transformative power of the web 2.0 world. In Peters’ words, “it was a blog and the people from around the world that came to read and give me encouragement on it every day, that literally saved my life in the end.”

Kevin Barbieux, the homeless guy, writes, “Justice is a thing to strive for, and ideal to consider when determining another person’s fate. But there is no real thing as justice. The successful people of the world know this, and so they do not wait for justice to set them free from what ever bondage they may be under.”

Is justice worth seeking? can blogs create social change? An unknown writer at techlearning.com questions, ““Do you think students in our schools should be blogging? I absolutely DO. Not only from a literacy development side, but also from an identity search and “human voice” side. What do young people you know care about? What do they want to change? What are they doing about those issues?”

I could not agree with these sentiments more. The need to use the two way (more like a thousand different roads coming together at one digital intersection…..) traffic to address issues of social justice is paramount. I also wonder who has metrics on the digital divide and knows it rate of growth.

(3) Caution: satire ahead

I close with satire in an attempt to forecast a little bit more about 2020. So check out my post from August 10th, 2020. More accomplished writers could make this satire work, but here were my ideas: Hendrix wired in the sixties is the 2020 customer, the Pipes interface is one of the products in the iWeb Infinity package; the machine depicted in The Sneetches is the web 3.0 super computer and someone could name the 2020 equivalent of the money making “fix it up chappie” that runs off with the Sneetches’ money. I offer this question to my half-baked advertisement below:   Don’t you want to install the iWeb Infinity system now?