[Air-l] Web Science a Field of Study

['Gail Taylor]

I just read the news story "Web inventor fears for the future" that was published by the BBC News reporting TBL's fears relating to the 'dark side' of the Internet. He said some things in the news story that has the potential to fuel the Internet regulation fires. 

He said "certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web" which comes across to me as being a contradiction. The spread of misinformation, or opposing views of realities of life, is part of the democratic process. This process also recognizes that the flow of information is modulated by behaviors at the individual level among people living in society. His comments harken back to those that were shared in the discussion on this listserve, in the not too distant past, related to the formation of an academic oversight committee tasked with regulating Wikipedia entries. 

TBL also commented in the news story that courses at universities are not introducing students to both the technological and social sides of the technology. I've found this to be a true not only in academic settings, but also business settings. As a graduate student, I have been taking courses across disciplines for both the masters and Ph.D. degrees as a way to gain a good understanding of different ways that technical and social systems intersect and overlap when a person uses the Internet. I am also situating this information in previous experiences using the Internet and teaching/training others in academic and business settings to do the same since the early 1980s.

As a person who places high value on the social constructivist approach to creating knonwledge at all levels of members of society, I am personally alarmed by some of the comments TBL made in the news story due to concerns that suggestions such as these, and others that emerged in the conversations regarding the regulation of Wikipedia entries. I have a lot of respect for TBL but also find it ironic that concerns are being raised in 2006 as opposed to years ago when people started using the Internet to exchange misinformation in the form of data packets. Hmmm . . . 

Gail

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Gail D. Taylor, M.Ed.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Human Resource Education Ph.D. Student
Educational Psychology Teaching Assistant

"We can't just have mainstream behavior
on television in a free society. We have
to make sure we see the whole panorama 
of human behavior." -- Jerry Springer