The World Wide Web as Social Hypertext

The first versions of WWW ((what most people call “The Web”))) provide means for people around the world to exchange information between, to work together, to communicate, and to share documentation more efficiently. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser (called WWW browser) and Web server in March 1991, allowing hypertext documents to be stored, fetched, and viewed. The Web can be seen as a tremendous document store where these documents (web pages) can be fetched by typing their address into a web browser. To do that, two im- portant techniques have been developed. First, a language called Hypertext Markup Languag (HTML) tells the computers how to display documents which contain texts, photos, sounds, visuals (video), and animation, interactive

“People can take their time when posting information about themselves, carefully selecting what aspects they would like to emphasize (Gonzales 80).” By controlling what information and self-attributes to share with the online world, an individual may present an idealized version of self that would not align with societal perceptions in the face-to-face interactions. Furthermore, Gonzales notes that recent research in computer-mediated communications suggests that online self-presentations can alter self-perceptions (80). As Orenstein says, “I tweet, therefore I am.” The online presentations of self can become the reality, or idealized reality, of the

Social media allow persons from all over the world to remain contact and communicate with their friends, family, at the same time make new connections. As stated by Amedie, social media sites are known for allowing people to make new connections with people who share similar interests, creating new relationships, and people end up being good friends (4). In fact, people create groups that accommodate subscribers who have similar interests or life goals where they assist each other. Again, there are friends or family members who are a thousand miles away; and through the use of social sites, it is easy to often communicate with them, increasing intimacy at a reduced cost. Furthermore, social networks have encouraged the users to come up with an online persona, which establishes a personal network of friends who connect to an open worldwide community.

The web brings people together with common interests and helps unite people as a whole.

Most people are uptight about the likes and comments they receive on social media websites, Carr formally proclaims. All of the popular websites use this method to receive more people active on them. Doing this urges people to share personal details about their life. “...people share four times as much information about themselves when they converse through computers as when they talk in person” (Carr 3). It is not necessary for people to share an extreme amount of details about their lives, but they still do.

Scientists in the same year began to create what is known as today as the Modern World Wide Web, the emergence of the modern Internet today. Several online web servers held information on pages of text known as websites, in which they each had their own website name to access (History of the Internet). A new application called the web browser was created in order to access all of the web pages available on the internet to the public. The way the information was presented on the web page was with a hypertext markup language (HTML); this would become a standard format to display informational text (Goel, Tarun). A URL link was also introduced on the web browser as an address to access web pages for the public. The result of the internet had changed how people have done research to access more information and how people have communicated with one another (Goel, Tarun).

In the essay “The Net Is a Waste of Time” by William Gibson, he talks about how he is an “avid browser of the World Wide Web.” While people find this to be odd and his wife finds it positively perverse, Gibson thinks differently saying “I, however, scent big changes afoot, possibilities that were never quite as manifest in earlier incarnations of the Net” (Gibson 691). While some people think he is wasting his time with the web, he believes it will be the tool of the future. Even though the internet has greatly changed since Gibson wrote this essay, I believe that the internet will continue to grow, and will become a bigger part of our everyday lives.

The Web is structure on the idea of sharing, for the most part for free. This evens the playing field to everyone with a computer, a phone, and/or a tablet and the connection to the internet. This means the average person has a platform and an audience, something that has never happened before until recently.

It is crazy to think of all the social networking sites that people have been utilizing in the last several years to be able to adopt a personality and “show off” their life, or a life that they wish others see them living. “Status Update”, Marwick discusses in his introduction that “to boost social status, young professionals adopt self-consciously constructed personas and market themselves, like brands or celebrities, to an audience or fan base”. With continuous technological innovations that allow individuals to be connected to each other, there seems to be a growing need for people to brand themselves in a way that allows them to be seen in a more positive manner.

This means that people can now directly choose how they wish to be seen and there are often many cases of having different “selves” among different platforms. For example, in Turkle’s studies, she interviewed multiple students about the function and effect of poplar social media website, Facebook. A couple of college seniors described Facebook in the same way, but with different words. Eric told her, “It’s like being in a play. You make a character,” and he then describes to Turkle about how you can “mold a Facebook page” (Turkle 441). Another college senior she interviewed, Brad, says something similar, “You have to know that everything you put up will be perused very carefully. And that makes it necessary for you to obsess over what you do put up and how you portray yourself” (Turkle 441). Turkle’s conclusion on this is that Facebook becomes a way to create the “best version” of you by compiling all of your likes/dislikes and personality traits into lists. In other words, Facebook is a place where you must reduce yourself to fit into stereotypes (Turkle 441). Many of the college students Turkle interviewed agree that this causes stress on how one presents himself, not only online, but also when it comes time to perform in the real world. It causes people to be on the constant lookout for

|Internet and the World Wide Web |The Internet and World Wide Web was an extremely useful tool that is still utilized today. In 1993 the World|

In this day and age you can find almost anything online. You can access the web from your laptop, your phone, even your game consoles and televisions. We were born in a time where the web was always there for our convenience, but how many of us actually know where it all started? The biggest tool in our society was created in 1989 by the man known as Tim Berners-Lee.

The World-Wide Web can be defined as a collection of different services and documents which are distributed all over the Internet and linked together by hypertext links. The web is therefore a subset of the Internet and not the same thing. It provides a hypertext-hypermedia interface to information resources in the internet and hence it is also called as a distributed hypermedia system.

The web browser application is found on these digital devices, and is used as the main application to garner information on the Internet. The web browser can be viewed as a window looking out into the vast space of the Internet which allows a user to view the enormous encyclopedia that has been created by the human race.

Living in the 21st century requires one to stay current with latest technological advancements. Ever since the development of social networking sites, people are now able to create a carefully-crafted identity for themselves. This has led psychologists to question how well these online personalities match the person in front of the computer. The innovative branch of media psychology looks into how social networking portrays individuals and initiates human interactions within a society.