The Transparency of the Web

19th of May, 2005 (Last modified: 24th of May, 2005) Håvard English , General , WWW ,

Whenever something is published on the Web and one out of two requirements is met, one being that it's got referring links to it and the other being that it isn't excluded from Web search engines, anyone can find the document, read it, and cite it. This is what the transparency of the Web is all about and Web searches play a crucial role in how we perceive the internet.

The good thing with this transparency is that information is easily available for anyone to use, given that they have access to the internet. Many students are benefiting from this transparency as they, as mentioned, easily can access this information and chances are that someone out there has written something about the exact same topic as their task and that it is freely available on the internet. If not everything of the same quality it is probably still worth taking into account whenever writing a paper.

At the same time this transparency can cause various problems in terms of integrity and validity of the new product as one can, with ease, hand in something which may not be entirely one's own work.

In the years before Google and the other Web search engines for Web was invented, finding information on the Web was a slow, time-consuming and tiresome process. In most cases an activity limited to those with time to spend and the knowledge of where to even start looking for the information. Nowadays finding information on the Web is so easy that it is not a problem anymore and in most cases one will spend by far more time looking for information and documents on one’s own computer and hard-drive.

As already mentioned; the availability of information is a problem in itself when the information used is not cited in a proper way. To quote another work is not an act of a genius; to write something new and innovative is. One way of citing works however is through the use of the MLA-style. This way of citing works leads to transparency of your work, a transparency which allows the reader to check your citations and quoted works in order to ensure that the work has a certain level of academic accuracy.

1 Response to “The Transparency of the Web”

  1. Martin May 19th, 2005 at 22:38

    Great work, Håvard! You cover the transparency of the web in an easy understandable way. I suggest that you also write some words about how to maintain privacy on the web, and how to prevent your information from falling into the wrong hands, as it’s a huge topic of interests these days. Information should be at your fingertips at all needs, but only accessible for you and for whom you grant access. You also touch an other interesting topic. How could you keep track of all your information by letting it being indexed by a search engine, in example in an intranet, without giving the vital information away to the public areas of internet?

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