While reading article, “The World Wide Web” by T. Berners-Lee, I honestly only understood about half of what was being discussed, but I was able to grasp that the article was old news. Literally. I think it’s kinda funny—but more ironic, that while I was reading the article I was sitting in one of my classes, pretending to pay attention to the teacher but actually accessing the internet using my iPod.
The internet is at my fingertips. All day I check my email, check my Facebook, check my instant messenger. I bring the internet everywhere I go because it came equipped with my music player. The internet is one of my most helpful, most used tools. Yet, I don’t understand a thing about it.
I don’t know what HTTP or HTML is, I don’t know what it means or stands for even though I’ve read about it, I don’t want to know. All I want is to sit down, log onto my wireless internet, and get to wherever I want to go.
I think that with technological advances, we take more and more things for granted. I expect my electronics to connect me to the web instantly, when they don’t, I get mad. We forget to give credit to the people who make this stuff work. It’s such a complicated process, with actions and language that the average person does not understand. New technology is brought into society, it goes through motions: it’s tried out and either determined to be useless and thrown away, or it’s accepted. We may ask questions in the beginning but ultimately, after it becomes socially acceptable, we become accustomed to it. We don’t necessarily have to understand technology to use it. And we certainly don’t use it to understand it.
Improvements in the technology we already use are great, they make things easier for us. As every new technology emerges, we may not understand it but we must understand how to operate it in order to make it useful to us, so I guess we are learning something new.