Cerulean Cordillera

Posts Tagged ‘Weaving the Web’

Originally posted on Thursday, November 27, 2008

Yay! Just finished my first University essay!

Looking back, I could have started the readings a bit earlier. I definitely underestimated them. They’re thin books, but the Castells book can be very difficult to understand at times. Speaking of which, it’s about a month overdue at the Library… I wonder how much I owe…

Even more did I underestimate the length. At first I thought: “2500 words? That’s nothing! I used to write emails longer than that!” Then I realized that it’s five times the length of any essay I’ve ever written before, meaning that I won’t sleep early tonight.

The thesis isn’t the best. In a nutshell, I said that Castells is more detailed and has better insight than Tim Berners-Lee’s book, and I attributed the cause to the fact that it was published a few years later and the Internet is a fast growing entity. Hopefully the TA buys this argument. Though, I doubt I would have came up with a better thesis even if I did read Castells more in-depth. Castells is an academic analysis on the Internet’s socioeconomic impacts, but Tim Berners-Lee’s book is totally different. It’s like… a third of it is an autobiography of his life, a third of it is a biography of the World Wide Web, and the last third were visionary statements, plans, and philosophy. It’s not exactly an academic book. The language is really toned down too, it’s more like a book for popular reading. I don’t think I would have drawn better parallels than I already have for this essay. Bad choices of books? Maybe, but how would I have known? Provided, of course, that I spend a reasonable amount of time on this, thus rendering reading through dozens of books first before choosing not an option.

I hate and love Castells at the same time. His writing style is so annoyingly verbose, and I dislike anyone who actually uses vis-a-vis in writing. But at the same time, I have to agree that some of his ideas are pretty amazing. The most impressive, though, is his seemingly endless amount of knowledge pertaining to the Internet, and to think that this book is supposed to be a watered-down version of a trilogy…

For the record, I finished at 5AM.

Originally posted on Monday, November 14, 2008

I came across this quote in one of my essay readings:

“People have sometimes asked me whether I am upset that I have not made a lot of money from the Web. In fact, I made some quite conscious decisions about which way to take my life. These I would not change – though I am making no comment on what I might do in the future. What does distress me, though, is how important a question it seems to be to some. This happens mostly in America, not Europe. What is maddening is the terrible notion that a person’s value depends on how important and financially successful they are, and that that is measured in terms of money. That suggest disrespect for the researchers across the globe developing ideas for the next leaps in science and technology. Core in my upbringing was a value system that put monetary gain well in its place, behind things like doing what I really want to do. To use net worth as a criterion by which to judge people is to set our children’s sights on cash rather than on things that will actually make them happy.”

~Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

I thought it was an awesome quote. The message behind it is cliched, although well worth mentioning since we tend to forget or ignore things that are cliched but also important. What will truly make us happy in the future is difficult to predict – the complex interconnections between all the subproblems of life begs the use of a greedy algorithm to simplify things, as any other micromanagement solution is beyond human capacity. However, the obvious thing we ought to optimize is happiness, not economic value. It is much safer to bet on a greedy algorithm that optimizes happiness, than to bet on a greedy algorithm that optimizes economic wealth and at the same time, to also bet on that economic wealth will bring happiness.

How’s that for using technical jargon to describe a way of life? Appreciate those with the capacity to be happy, and you shall be happy. Appreciate those with the capacity to be rich, and you might be rich, but you might not be happy. To be happy is easy, one merely has to adopt a mindset. To be rich is difficult, for one must struggle endlessly in the competitive market. To be happy requires a certain degree of wealth, not the maximum potential. Being rich is usually a nice side effect you get for reaching a good degree of your happiness. Basically, focus on happiness and you’ll probably be rich. Focus on richness and you’re not guaranteed happiness. If you want both, focus on your happiness. That’s probably the practical and less ideological way of understanding this viewpoint.

Anyway, that was my attempt to disect the reasoning behind the old and cliched (but important in many contexts) viewpoint that money != happiness.