For most people the Internet is a fact. It is always 'on ' and it does just what it should do: it gets you emails, videos, music and news. It makes you able to communicate with people all over the world easily, you can buy clothes and you can also gather information about basically anything. You put data in and somewhere else it almost simultaneously comes out again. About forty years ago, when the Internet was just introduced, this immense growth of the Internet as well as the impact it has nowadays was not foreseen. However, the opinion on our big invention ‘The Internet’, is often strongly divided.
One of the people who never believed the Internet would have such a big impact that it has now, was Clifford Stoll. In his column titled ‘Why the Web won’t be Nirvana’ for the Europe Newsweek, written in 1995, he wrote about how no online database would ever replace for example newspapers, teachers or books: “Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we 'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the
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In his book he writes how user-generated context is killing our culture and economy. He states that the downside to the fact that anybody can write anything on the world wide web, actually is that anybody can write anything on the world wide web. More information leads to more perspectives and more opinions, without most of it being filtered. The information we find on the Internet, especially in the media, is most often written by amateurs. “Amateurs are replacing the experts,” Keen says. This while the experts are the only ones who can create quality context, since it is only them who have access to reliable resources: “Wisdom is not in the crowd but in people with expertise and talent.” Because we ourselves allow this massive flow of information to emerge, it is also our responsibility to be critical when consuming and creating content, isn’t