Blog 6

How the Web Polarized Politics

1. What does the author mean by political polarization?

When the author talks about “political polarization”, he is referring to the often extreme opposing views of different parties. Meaning those who are democrats are strongly rooted in their beliefs, and those who are republicans are just as strongly tied to theirs...with almost no chance of one part influencing a member of the other party to change opinions.

2. What are your thoughts about the statement, "Governments feel they are royalty to some degree"?

I agree with the author on that thought. Governments are there to make and enforce laws and policies and don’t expect us to question it or oppose it. They feel that it’s their job to know what is best for us and act upon that knowledge regardless of how much opinions might vary on their policies.

Do you agree/disagree with the statement, "We've literally experienced an information tsunami-but more information does not mean better decisions"? Why?

I definitely agree with this statement. Over a short period of time, every piece of information that’s ever been published (and plenty that has not) has all of a sudden become available to us in a very direct way in an easily-accessible environment. We have been bombarded with endless amounts of information from every which corner of the globe. But just because we have all this information doesn’t mean someone will use this information to make better decisions. In fact, this information will most likely just help support the decisions that an individual has already made, helping enforce his or her beliefs in one direction or another.

The author states that "the very technology that is meant to solve problems merely makes people more emotional-not more reasonable". Give an example of a real life digital convergence that can be viewed to make people more emotional.

In giving an example, I’m going to use the Author’s topic of politics. Let’s say the example of digital convergence is that a political candidate (republican for example) makes a speech and puts it on youtube or some other public online video forum. And let’s say that both republicans AND democrats are watching this video, and that the website allows any individual to comment or post to a common message board. If you were in your own home watching a broadcast of this speech, you would most likely have only a couple people in your household with which you would discuss this. However, in an open forum such as a video website, all of a sudden you’d be looking at varying opinions from people who are hardcore republican and people who are strong democrats. This now creates a forum where people can easily get out of hand, where looking at opinions that are different than yours can cause you to get agitated with each and every comment that doesn’t go along with what you believe. So, instead of being at home and having a constructive discussion about politics with whoever is around you, you are now having a mass argument on a large scale with multiple people at one time, and it is causing every party involved to speak their mind with no inhibitions.

Digital Future of the United States: Part 1--the Future of the World Wide Web

The Web has been a platform for the creation of a wide and unanticipated variety of services. Name one of the commercial services and how you apply the service to your daily/weekly routine.

One commercial services I use is a website called www.mint.com. Mint is an online budgeting website. You sign up (for free) and give them the account information of any account you have. I have entered in my credit card information, my student loan information, my checking account information and my savings account information. You then put in a budget for different aspects of your spending for the month (for example, I allow $40 for groceries a month, $70 for my cell phone, $50 for gas, etc). It then, daily, taps into all your different accounts and gathers information on how much you’ve spent on each account, your spending trends, your account balances and transactions, etc. I use this every day to help budget my money so I can start saving my money.

What does the author mean by "Semantic Web"? How does this effect the future of convergence?
I am a little confused on the idea of the Semantic Web. It says that it would enable any individual that puts information on the web to link them to other pieces of data using standard formats. Aren’t we able to do that already? Or is it referring to ANY piece of data we put in the web? Like if I type an email to my friend about Tennis, I can link pieces of my email to information about tennis? I’m a little unclear on this subject.


The future of the web has created substantial privacy challenges which are barely addressed by our current privacy laws. What are your thoughts on new data integration? Is the thought of this legal?

I think the ideas behind data integration are good, and I believe it at first would only be implemented with good intentions, for the benefit of others. On one hand think it would pose a huge privacy challenge, but on the other hand, if people are putting information on the internet to begin with then it’s already in the public domain and could be subject to any data-gathering.