The British Colonization of India and Beans from Even Stevens

 

Last Wednesday I was doing a little research on the internet for a paper about British colonization of India when suddenly it popped into my head, “I wonder what Beans from Even Stevens looks like as an adult.” I open a new browser and typed his name into Google. Half an hour later I knew everything about Steven Anthony Lawrence, born on January 19, 1990, who was last seen in an Old Spice commercial in 2012 dressed as a dog, and nothing about the essay I was supposed to be writing. It is things like this that make us ask ourselves: Is this really what the internet is for?  As I go off on unproductive research tangents I often wonder: Am I using the internet for its full designed purpose? The internet encompasses so much from, dating websites, to online shopping, to scientific research, but its real purpose is often inquired. Bush argues technology should work to organize and connect our data and Lee continues that in saying the connections should be like the human mind, while I would say that the purpose of the internet is for whatever you want it to be.

                Bush argues in his essay, “As We May Think”, that technology is made for progress, so that the right information can get into the right hands of the right people and then, they will help the betterment of society. He explains though, that there is so much information that sometimes it’s hard to sort through. The editor states that “men of science should turn to the massive of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge” (Editor). Bush goes on to say that these men are making mounds of research, but how is it useful if it doesn’t get in the right hands. Where will there be progress? Bush, as the inventor of the hypothetical memex, tried to do this. He tried to make a system where “any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” (Bush 7). He never succeeded in creating this, but one understands Bush’s idea. He would believe that the internet is here to organize and file our mass amounts of information in a way that they could all be connected.

 

                Tim Berners Lee explains in his book, Weaving the Web, that his invention of html was to be somewhat like the human mind. Like Bush, he wanted information to be linked together, “anything potentially connected with anything” (Lee 1).  He didn’t want the internet to be used for just one type of thing. The name Lee gave for his first codes for the internet was Enquire short for “Enquire Within upon Everything”. He makes known that the internet was intended, not just for research or science, but also for things like “buying books from Amazon.com and stocks from E-trade” and those things still aren’t “all there is to the web” (Lee 2).  He said he wanted the internet to be a place where you could go anywhere, much like how the mind can wander from subject to subject. One day Lee came home from high school and his dad was working on his speech for Basil de Ferranti. He was doing research to allow the computer to make connections how the brain does. The thought stayed with Lee that, “computers could become much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information” (Lee 4). Lee went to help make computers just that, an interconnected system of information where a random bit of information can be accessed at anytime. In the below video Lee talks about how he came to invent html through the frustration of information not being connected.

                To me obvious answer would be that the internet’s purpose is anything you want it to be. This answer seems hard to dispute. It was created so that the mass amounts of data, whether productive or not, we have compiled over the years can become organized. It is organized this way so that whoever may need to information may retrieve it. This information could be an email that a professor sends out about cancelling class or the electronic submission of money in exchange for a pair of shoes bought over a clothing website. The internet is here so that no matter who you are you can find what it is your looking for, but the “what” is up to you. I believe though that this is based off of Lee’s and Bush’s ideas. They emphasize the organization part of the internet, but it is the organization that helps us to reach this goal.

                The internet, this mass compilation of random content, is for a variety of things. While on my tangent research of Steven Anthony Lawrence, and finding his weird obsession for blue button downs, was I using the internet for what it was invented to be? I would have to say yes. The internet isn’t for this strict purpose of research. It’s for many things, including my random outbursts of unproductive research. It’s for research on Abe Lincoln and book reviews. It’s for online shopping and setting up blind dates. It’s for posting pictures on social media and for buying planes tickets. The internet is for research on the British colonization of India and finding out everything you need to know about Beans from Even Stevens.

Works Cited

                Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fischetti. "Enquire Within Uopn Everything." Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. 1-4. Print.

Vannevar, Bush. "As We May Think." As We May Think. Denys Duchier University of Ottawa, Apr. 1994. Web. 15 Oct. 2013.