Kelly's article, We are the Web, outlines how businesses weren't ready to accept the internet as the 'next big thing.' Also, though the idea of the hyperlink was intended to expand information access and knowledge, Kelly writes that it accomplished much more than this, "The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history." The explosion of the internet over the past 15 years has allowed the world to be viewed in ways previously impossible. Kelly attributes the growth to individual users, not by corporations, which is perhaps their lack of enthusiasm about the internet in its beginnings was not so very detrimental, "What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests." He goes on to further describe the benefits of hyperlinks, he says that it becomes powerful in sharing information across millions of people. In 2015, Kelly predicts that the web will continue to be controlled more and more by active participants. However, Kelly asks the question, "If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer?" His other article, "The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed" gives a somewhat idealistic overview of the internet as a space where people go for entertainment and to share with others, and not as a money-making venue. He writes, "As the Internet continues to expand in volume and diversity without interruption, only a relatively small percent of its total mass will be money-making. The rest will be created and maintained out of passion, enthusiasm, a sense of civic obligation, or simply on the faith that it may later provide some economic use." I suppose that most people use the internet for their personal pleasure, but I also think that as the internet begins to dominate business groups, the economic portion will also increase exponentially.
In Lurie's essay, he writes how the current government (from 2003) is ruled by conservatives, but how this ideology of fear and conservatism will change by how information can be found, "The architecture of the web, and the way users navigate it, closely resembles theories about the authority and coherence of texts that liberal deconstructionist critics have offered for thirty years" and then goes on to say that "surfing mimics a postmodern, deconstructionist perspective by undermining the authority of texts." The way that people use the internet is apparently the same way that deconstructionists look at different texts, in that they are more interested in the process of how information is received, than the actual text itself. Though this makes some sense with his argument, I'm not sure that surfers on the internet actually care about how the web is all linked together or if they are more interested in being entertained, or getting the information they want. Obviously, however, Lurie disagrees, "Its influence is structural rather than informational, and its structure is agnostic."
I do agree with his argument that the internet invites the reader to switch back and forth between pages, finding a different set or source for information than that person might initially expect. He makes this point in his paragraph about the Constitution online, saying that links will lead the viewer to be skeptical and perhaps doubt the information they might have previously believed. He finally mentions a paradox that technology creates, writing that, "Technology undermines traditional belief systems even as it creates a belief in a kind of heavenly paradise, a kind of Technopia." I guess what he means is that the deconstructionist understanding of the internet, while undermining how much people can trust their information by linking them to other sources, also has such great access and worlwide prevalence that it can create this idealized world.
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