Steven Johnson – It’s All about Us

The internet is growing at an amazing exponential rate. Nearly every piece of information known has been posted on some website. Now days, the web is directed and aimed at “us” or the general population. It is there to help us for whatever we need. Anyone can simply go onto Wikipedia and post anything they want and claim it fact. This could be a bad thing and this easily could be a great thing. In Steven Johnson’s It’s All about Us, he states “bloggers and Wikipedians are likely to do some things better than their professional equivalents and some things much worse” (447). Johnson is saying that these posts can either lead us down a new road that we never thought of or corrupt the present thoughts we have. It can go either way because there is no filter to what someone is allowed to say. For instance, there has been a huge boom in worthless drool on the internet that has no real meaning or use. A perfect example would be Facebook. Everyone posts random things about their day and what not. As Johnson points out “there is undeniably a vast increase in the sheer quantity of accessibility of pure crap” (447). He is saying that more and more pointless “crap” is making it onto the web thanks to everyone. An interesting way to think of it is that what might be pointless dribble to you might be extremely important to me. An ingenious use of blogging is the local conversations about your community. Local parents can easily go check out what is going on around them. Whether there has been a robbery on this street or a new library on that street. It is an easy way to connect the community on a virtual level without having to physically walk around and interview each person about what happened that day. This was never an option and I think we should take advantage of can so easily help our communities. Johnson mentions that “local knowledge has been limited historically to the personal contact of word-of-mouth. Now, on the Web, it has a megaphone” (448). He is aware of the possibilities that come with this technology. What we need to keep in mind is that we need to continue to expand our internet experience and not get into a cycle of the same websites. There is so much information to be seen and read. There are so many uses and possibilities that the internet will never stop growing.