Jay's Expose

Last month, I heard about bitcoin for the first time in my life. I was awestruck by the idea of a currency that was completely online and never passed the threshold into a physical currency that a person could hold in their hands. It was interesting to talk about how bitcoin works and how money is minted and then to also discuss how blockchain works. The way that I understood it is that blockchain is a way of trading things, but the item itself records what it has been traded for and leaves a trace of what transactions have occurred in order to keep its credibility. This is an interesting form of currency, cryptocurrency, that is gaining popularity day by day.

In one of the articles that we read, “Three Challenges for the web, according to its inventor”, it discussed how the world wide web began 28 years ago, and how in many ways it was living up to its purpose of being a place to share information and collaborate. It did raise a few points of improvement which I found intriguing and personally relatable. The main points were that we don’t have control of our personal data, misinformation spreads like wildfire on the web and lastly, that there needs to be some type of change in political advertising that doesn’t give users such one sided information. I can relate to the first point because I know that whenever I accept a hundreds long page of terms and conditions I am giving up some degree of privacy in terms of my data being shared. It’s not like I can decide what to share. Just as the idea of “all or none” suggests, I can either give up my privacy rights or not use the application at all. It is hard to give up the opportunity to use an application in the name of security, and most people don’t, but the option to do so would be nice. To the second point, the lack of true information that circulates the internet is so common that people commonly talk about it by saying, “Don’t trust everything you hear on the Internet.” Also, the concept of “Fake News” is very prevalent in society today. So many people have the power of publication in their hands and it changes everything. No longer is information that is put out there expected to be truthful. This makes it harder to know whether you’re getting good information or being lied to. Nowadays, when writing papers and finding sources, there are specific websites that check out the credibility of certain sources before students trustingly add them to their papers. Finally on the political front, a lot of people get their political information from social media, and now with so much polarization of information, voters tend to only see extremely polarized messages and it isn’t the best when it comes to helping voters to be educated about who and what issues they are voting for. I can see this in my life when talking to friends who are new voters and when I hear about some of the things they have heard in their news, it doesn’t always match up with what I’ve heard. These kind of discrepancies and campaigning online that twist stories to make a stronger point is not the best way to keep society educated and ready to vote on the important issues. Now that the basics of the Internet are well established, we can all set out to make the Internet a better place.