It’s kind of funny how naïve people from my generation, including myself, can be about the internet. When people from older generations tell us how they had to walk fifteen miles through rough terrain without shoes just so that they could reach a library, we laugh at the ridiculousness of their tell-tale stories. And yet, as over-exaggerated as the stories are, we can’t help but feel a sense of wonder after the striking realization that the internet hasn’t been around forever, in fact, it hasn’t been around for that long at all. Perhaps that is the genius of the W3, that because of its complexity, and its seemingly infinite nature, we ascribe an everlasting quality to it. This is why it was so surprising to read the authors of this week’s reading telling the reader, “if you haven’t experienced the Web, the best way to find out about it is to try it” (792). If the article was written today, he may as well have been talking to three of four individuals on this planet, but back in 1994, I presume access to the internet was sparse. That should come as no surprise, but it does, because I can’t imagine a world without the Internet. But can you blame me?

The W3 has evolved extremely rapidly from a “pool of human knowledge,” where only a few people had access to its confined and finite body, to a “vast sea of human knowledge,” a body of information that extends to every human being who happens to have access to the shore. It is a body of information that has infinite possibilities, or a “boundless information world in which all items have a reference by which they can be retrieved” (793). All of this information is easily obtained, and the W3 is no doubt the simplest access to information available. No more going through card-catalogs or searching for reference numbers in order to find a certain article from the library (these methods seem all too ancient nowadays).

Prepare yourself. I’m about to go off-topic, but I have a point to make…I think.

Now, I had a lot of trouble reading the article because I am not technically savvy yet, and all this about W3 client-servers, HTML, HTTP, etc. left me in disarray. I’ve been feeling lost at sea without a beacon to guide me in the right direction. But yesterday, the light had shined upon my face as I watched the Compassion Forum with Hillary Clinton on CNN. There was something she was saying about God’s grace, and although I didn’t understand any of the mumbo-jumbo spewing out of her mouth, I still had a revelation. When I heard “God’s Grace,” the only thing running through my mind was Google. The first reason was because it was perfect alliteration (you know, Google, God, grace), and the second reason is because I realized that it didn’t matter if I didn’t understand the article, because I didn’t understand Hillary Clinton either! And thus, I went to Google.com and searched for God’s grace, and low and behold, I got this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_grac…

I was on a roll. I then searched for client servers and I got this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-serv…

And then I searched for HTTP, and I got this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP

And so you see, ladies and gentleman, if you don’t come to grips with complex ideas, then you are not alone, because someone is thinking about you on the internet. It may not be God, it may not be Hillary Clinton, but someone out there has created a Wiki just for you so that you are not left in the darkness ever again. The Wiki has been thrown into a river of knowledge that is Google, and Google is thrown into a sea of knowledge that is the W3.