Author: Dejan Milojicic
Publisher: IEEE Concurrency
URL: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Dejan_Milojicic/Internet.pdf
ABSTRACT
Dejan Milojojic of Hewlett Packard Laboratories featured people who took part in bringing the Internet technical revolution -- Erik Brewer of Inktomi and the University of California at Berkeley, Fred Douglis of AT&T Labs–Research, Peter Druschel of Rice University, Gary Herman of HP Labs, Franklin Reynolds
of Nokia, and Munindar Singh of North Carolina State University -- and their insights on internet and web-based technologies: what brought about its emergence, how it affects the internet and it's future, technologies that will dominate the web's future, some controversial technologies and issues on privacy and security.
What I learned
We are all aware that today, the Internet can be accessed anywhere. You can go to the beach and read your mails. You can get your flight schedule changed while getting a foot spa. Now, it's on people's phones... and on land line units, even. According to Gary Herman, director of the Internet and Mobile Systems Laboratory in Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA, and Bristol, UK, a factor that made this possible is the gradual cutbacks on the cost of technology. The Internet that gives people the liberty to create, publish and access information just became affordable. Before this, however, information assembly and dissemination took much needed time and resources. The emergence of advanced technologies revolutionized the processes in the information infrastructure at an expensive cost, at first. But as new technologies developed, and as these new technologies chop and change, older (yet still relatively new) ones became affordable, faster.
We have come to a time that almost everything can be done via the internet: send postcards, research, spell check, purchase items, shop, etc. This current state of technology has been foreseen by Eric A. Brewer (2000), chief scientist and co-founder of Inktomi Corporation (a search company acquired by Yahoo! in 2003). He said that the most important force that will push the internet at the center of the information infrastructure is the need to always be on-line (always-on principle). True enough. The Internet has established itself a need to the many facets of human living. It came fast and we have now made it (internet and web-based technologies) responsive to the growing needs of the society as a unit that continually learns and strives to upgrade itself.
Peter Druschel, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice University in Houston, Texas predicted 10 years ago that the possible areas where major application of internet and web-based technologies would be seen in electronic commerce, distance education, distance collaboration, and entertainment (2000). Head of the Distributed Systems Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research and professor at the Princeton University and the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Fred Douglis, considered e-commerce, pornography, interactive chat rooms, and games also as targets of the internet and web-based applications. These forecasts somehow came true.
Today, advertising and e-commerce is one of the drivers of profit in web-based technologies and applications (Douglis, 2000). The more users you have, whether you offer your web service for free or not, the more advertisers you can have -- bottom line: more profit. If your blog has thousands of subscribers, you can get more advertisers invest in your page. As relevant information is disseminated, advertisements pop-up, almost on all web pages. To get these ads to work and rendered effective, from a marketing perspective, information from internet users like demographics, statistics, and the like, are needed. The question now is "How is the marketing information obtained?" According to Douglis, lack of privacy comes into the picture in this specific situation.
The possibilities with the internet as of now seems endless and access to all these technology over the world wide web have become venues of controversy. Its attribution to "being limitless" alone is of great importance. If information is easier to assemble and disseminate, then access, what controls do these internet or web-based technologies have? Who controls access to it? These are issues tackled in the November 1999 Internet Engineering Task Force meeting (Reynolds, 2000). According to Franklin Reynolds, a senior research engineer at Nokia Networks and works at the Nokia Research Center in Boston,"Security and privacy-related technologies are already the most controversial, and I expect the controversy to intensify in the future. There are many issues, for example, should a government be able to eavesdrop on your Internet use? Should your employer? (2000)" Nonetheless, online advertising, the need for internet-user information, and security and/or privacy are risks and, at the same time, contributing factors to the development of better web-based and internet technologies that we just have to accept an adapt to through standardizing measures. Munindar Singh, an assistant professor in computer science at North Carolina State University, author of Multiagent Systems, predicted correct that security standards shall be established and people will be able to check their privacy requirements. Perhaps, this is where the role of the information professional comes in.
There are a couple of perspectives from which one can view the role of an information professionals in the reinforcement of information privacy. If the information professional is a librarian and in a library setup, perhaps, he can help with ensuring that passwords are kept confidential in accounts in subscriptions of users to different web-based applications. In the corporate setup, database administrators and electronic resources personnel can make sure that the in-house information is stored properly and various controls of access are established and enforced. Standards for information management and security can also be observed. There are various organizations, like the International Standardization Organization (ISO), that currently concentrate in various process and operational standards in all fields, that give accreditation to various industries (e.g., for service industries, ISO 2008). These measures of standardization have been used by some private companies as basis for acquiring and/or hiring different kinds of services. It's their way of making sure that the service they intend to pay for are adherent to internationally recommended standards or processes. The information professional can initiate this in a private company as a chance to document the entirety of the company's processes, in the aim of improving and recording the progress of the improvement effort.
Internet and web-based technologies will continue to affect the different aspects of our lives. In this age, everything updates faster and these updates are disseminated almost real time. Certainly, the process will just go on as long as the society's needs and demands grow and change. The wide array of technology that one can work with are accessible; and this accessibility pushes a challenge when security and privacy or censorship comes in the picture. As Singh said, "with security, people are either extremely careless about it or they’re really paranoid about it -- with nothing in the middle." The role of the information professional is to carefully draw the line between security, fair usage and privacy.
The internet has brought us a lot of good as much as it has brought a jigsaw to solve. It has rendered our society equipped with the tools and information sources. But with these tools are risks which should be viewed as a challenge to adapt to. Which outweighs which? Perhaps it all depends on how we manage and regulate the enormity of benefits web-based technologies can provide.
Reflection:
With the emergence of these web-based technologies, the manner by which information is processed (from origination/creation to usage) is revolutionized. It continually adapts to and affects the information needs of the society. The society and these technologies are both powerful forces. At some point, the society has made technology possible. But as time went by, the same society that made technology possible is immersed in anxiety and enormity of possibilities brought about by the same technology they made possible. Which affects which? Is the information infrastructure a growing organism? The challenge to the society falls upon the hands of information professionals like us, in the advent of the digital age. Managing information storage, retrieval, preservation and dissemination, as according to carefully studied user needs, the basics, can also be applied to these situations. Information professionals should gear themselves toward making these internet and web-base technologies work for the society and not the other way around.
Sources
Articles
Milojicic, Dejan. (January, 2000). Internet Technology. IEEE Concurrency, 8 (1), 70-81. Retrieved June 27, 2012, from http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Dejan_Milojicic/Internet.pdf
Turgeon, A. J., (May 29, 2002). Implications of Web-Based Technology for Engaging Students in a Learning Society. Journal of Public Service and Outreach 2(2), 32-37. Retrieved June 25, 2012 from http://www.adec.edu/user/resource/turgeon-implications.html
Gorman, Michael. (2001). Privacy in the Digital environment—issues for libraries. Retrieved June 26, 2012 from http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla67/papers/145-083e.pdf
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