The internet has become a tangled web of good and bad. Much like anything that has been created, the internet has been used for purposes far beyond what it was originally intended for. For this week's discussion, I read Frank Chimero's article that explored the meaning of native design. It went into much more than that, including how our perception of the world is completely wrong based on the inaccurate maps we've been taught all our lives. That revelation left me a bit astounded.
It was that revelation that made me think of the Spiderman quote, "With great power comes great responsibility." As someone who will be taking part of modifying the codebase of some small portion of the internet for the foreseeable future, it was a little daunting to think of how that power to create could be misused. There's a reason why all computer science majors have to take an ethics course in order to graduate. In fact, for my final paper for that class, I argued that Instagram developers were morally responsible for how their design contributes towards the negative mental health of their users. And sure, the concepts of act utilitarianism can be dry at times, but they're nonetheless important to understand.
The danger Chimero mentioned was that we think we know everything, but we really don't know anything. It is really impressive how quickly we have adapted to technology. People often times think of the internet as absolute, that the facts we find there are indeed facts that cannot be changed. Except, we've seen that the internet can lie as much as humans can. The most important thing that we can teach people is that the internet is a projection of ourselves--not some robotic entity. An algorithm feeds you want you want to see and hear. Redesigning the internet to be different from what we know is a daunting task, but I think it is critical if we want our society to progress.