Week 8: Information and Networks

This post discusses the concept of networks. Networks are becoming increasingly prominent nowadays, with the most well known being the internet. The internet is a massive network containing all sorts of things. Anything you could dream of looking up is probably on the internet somewhere- train timetables, cheat codes, pornography, photos of cats with bread around their faces, historical anecdotes, more pornography, online shopping, blogs such as this one, videos and pornography. Did I mention pornography?

However, the problem with the internet is that there is arguably too much information on it. There are things most people would probably not want to look up online. These sites need site traffic as well, so they might exploit the networked nature of the internet by using false or misleading tags to drive people to click on it. At times, this is only an annoyance, when you arrive on a site that is not what you're looking for, but has at least tangential relevance- the cats are riding skateboards instead of putting bread around their faces, for example. The bigger problem is when this could potentially be harmful- a malicious website could trick people into clicking with promises of Twilight fanfiction, then display racist, xenophobic or otherwise harmful content, infect your computer with viruses and spyware, then spit in your chips for good measure.

Networking allows individuals greater ease of access to the information they want as well as related materials, but as with all things, there are unscrupulous individuals who will take advantage of this for their own malicious intentions.

Source: Burnett, R and Marshall, P.D. (2003) Web Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge.