Mandatory Blog Post #3 - The Free Web

The internet has become a place for anyone to post anything. There are no expenses for print, copyright or trademark. And outside of paying for internet service, it is free to the average Joe and can be monetized for businesses to make a financial gain. It has infinite possibilities due to its creator friendly attitude. Dreams are born and grown on the internet.

Marshall McLuhan writes in his book, The Medium Is The Massage, about authorship and how it was brought about mainly by the invention of the printing press. Before its invention, individuals considered their intellect to be public domain and part of a collective effort towards a more knowledgeable world. Many medieval writers would simply not sign their names and considered themselves public servants. Literary fame was only a result of the printing press. Ideas were given owners and with them spawned a market of readers. Books would fly off the shelves if it had the right name on it.     

Because of this, copyright was born in an attempt to prevent theft and piracy of ideas; this was something that was not seen before. Rather than having a collective of ideas for everyone to own and use, we now have to ask permission and cite any idea that was not previously ours. This why I have to cite even the slightest amount of information in MLA for all of my papers. But with the invention of the internet we have begun to see a lack of real authorship and more of the old idea of public information. 

"Xerography-every man's a brain-picker." This quote from McLuhan (found on page 123), talks about xeroxing separate pages from separate books and combining them into one book about any subject. This would be something like an encyclopedia of knowledge. This sounds a lot like something we all use now... can you guess it?

Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia of the web. It is a return to the idea of knowledge available to the public for free, not to mention the missing name of the author(s). Wiki does cite all of its sources of information, but the article itself is free for use and is editable by the public. The ideas of medieval writers were not available to the public for editing and books, as a result, had only one point of view. Because of the ease-of-access to editing, an article may have varying ideas and points of views.  This allows for a vast amount of various content.

Wikipedia can also be updated within seconds of new information. Previously, there would have to be several editions of the same book every so often to edit mistakes and add content which would take several months, with Wiki there are no editions and no cost. With this easy access to information at such a fast rate, people are learning more now than ever.

There are also no notable authors to any of the articles. Wikipedia is a collective effort done mainly for the public good; with this we can see the return of literary writing as a public service. There are now multiple Wiki sites dedicated to several different fields including comic books, video games, and even card games. Knowledge on the internet is not shared for profit or admiration, but simply for the sake of education.

With the birth of the internet we are seeing a re-emergence of knowledge as public domain. This format is popular considering the amount of traffic that Wikipedia gets and how it is constantly under study. I can't wait for the day when colleges will allow for students to use Wikipedia as an academic source.

"Teamwork succeeds private efforts." - Marshall McLuhan.