Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave an interview with radio station WBUR about the state of the Web and its future:
Berners-Lee initially imagined the web as a beautiful platform that could help us overcome national and cultural boundaries. He envisioned it would break down silos, but many people today believe the web has created silos.
And he still largely sees the potential of the web, but the web has not turned out to be the complete cyber Utopian dream he had hoped. He's particularly worried about the dark side of social media — places where he says anonymity is being used by "misogynist bullies, by nasty people who just get a kick out of being nasty."
He also identified personal data privacy, the spread of misinformation, and a lack of transparency in online political advertising as major problems with the current Web in a letter marking the World Wide Web's 28th birthday last month.
Previously: World Wide Web Turns 25 years Old
Tim Berners-Lee Proposes an Online Magna Carta
Berners-Lee on HTML 5: If It's Not on the Web, It Doesn't Exist
The First Website Went Online 25 Years Ago
Berners-Lee: World Wide Web is Spy Net
Tim Berners-Lee Just Gave us an Opening to Stop DRM in Web Standards
(Score: 4, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Wednesday April 05 2017, @10:25PM (1 child)
As far as misinformation is concerned no technology can fix stupid. If you're going to believe that #Pizzagate happened in the basement of a building that was built on a slab, technology will do nothing more than to exacerbate the issue by allowing others to feed you more stupid, causing you to believe your misinformation even more...rinse, repeat.
The irony is that older technology / media (printed news, radio, TV) was too limited and controlled to allow that level of misinformation to occur. Ironically the current state of web based misinformation has those affected believing that those "mainstream" sources are the only media they can't trust. The end result is information controlled by the likes of cheeto-man's tweets, which reminds me a lot of North Korea frankly.
What a fucking mess. I physically hurt just writing all this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @02:02PM
I think the reason for the backlash against mainstream sources (which I'm going to loosely define as media organizations owned by large corporate entities) is not only because they've been shown repeatedly to be completely dishonest but because they're so ingrained into the political system. So anything that exposes the ills of the political system is assumed true almost by default. And it goes both ways. You have many that disbelieve anything that comes from mainstream sources while naively opening themselves up to independent sources. But you also still have people that believe anything that comes from mainstream sources while naively disregarding everything stated by independent sources. The sad matter of the fact is that companies need to earn money to operate and there's far more money in "taking liberties" with the truth than there is giving plain non-sensationalized reporting of the news.
My only wonder is how far back this goes. I used to fall into the "it's mainstream so it must be true" category, at least to a substantial degree. Here's a video [youtube.com] that never really got much coverage, even though I think it's one of the most telling little accidental open mic conversations I've ever seen and between no less than Larry King and Bill Clinton just prior to his election victory.