Future directions in the online world

With so much human activity and cultural expression enabled in Web 2.0, what is Web 3.0? Look this up on the web and you will find no shortage of responses. There is no consensus – no agreement among experts or among users. We don't even know if we are already using Web 3.0, because it is hard to know where Web 2.0 ends.

Surely one valuable perspective on the present and the future of the internet would come from Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the internet in 1989. (It was released to the public in the 1990s).

Today Tim Berners-Lee has a new mission – to make sure we really are connected by the internet. He describes what drove him to pursue this mission this way:

"Now people feel very disempowered, because the end result is that they're telling their computer who their friends are, and who's in the photographs, and planning things and designing things - and those plans and designs and friendships are sucked up and held by these social networks. And they're not really social networks, they're silos".

The data you create as you move across online spaces is often controlled and owned by those spaces. Berners-Lee is now working to develop new methods of linking data across virtual space without relying upon governments, corporations, or the many others with an interest in controlling that data.

"Right now we have the worst of both worlds, in which people not only cannot control their data, but also can't really use it," Berners-Lee said in the project's announcement last year. "Our goal is to develop a web architecture that gives users ownership over their data".


First social media experiences

Social Media has been a part of my life since 6th grade. I didn't have a lot of friends then, as I had just moved to a new state and a new school. It was the only way of staying in contact with my friends for a while, until life got too busy for that and I eventually found my own friends in Washington. Looking on where I am now, nothing much has changed, especially with the pandemic. I use social media now to keep in contact with all my friends back in Tuscon and in Seattle.

However, keeping in contact with friends is something we all use social media for. What makes my experience unique is what else I use it for. I draw a lot, and post a lot of my work to twitter. I've been able to not only grow a following of people who like and even buy my art, but also have been able to make several friends online. I mainly interact with online communities like furries, and video game or film related fanbases. Especially since quarantine, by interacting with a few publics I already spent time with, I built relationships online with people who shared those same interests with me. Not only that, I've been able to gain a lot of experience and skill with my art thanks to these friends

Social media has given me a lot of opportunities both with my own personal work and with making new friendships, hell, I met my first boyfriend online. People think that a lot of the people who try to build relationships online are perverts or criminals or something. While I won't deny there are definitely predators online, 99.9% of the time they're just normal folk. Social Media has shown me that there's a lot more good people in the world than there are bad people, despite how much social media might make that seem the opposite. The best way to parse the genuine people and people who are looking to mess with you is just learning to read profiles and how they interact with others.

Now why can I make these claims of people wanting nothing but good for others? Well, other than my friends, I've seen that kind of kindness from complete strangers. Ive been commissioned to do art plenty of times, and every time, they offer to pay up front, take as much time as I need, tip me very generously, or any mix of the three. People are grateful for your business, and even to talk to you, and having that generosity given to you makes you want to pass the feeling forward. So you be kind to artists, and that makes you want to just be kind to everyone. Weirdly enough, social media has done nothing but boosted my confidence, as well as my social skills in real life. The stereotype is that a lot of people who spend too much time online don't have those kind of skills, but my time online has done nothing but helped me appreciate my time and friends in real life.

This excerpt demonstrates how the affordances of a platform can shift, challenging content creators.