Implications Today: The World Wide Web

"The interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens. Nothing that appears on the screen is meant to be deciphered in depth, but actually to be explored instantaneously"
(Stearns 75).

With this statement, Baudrillard is actually describing the World Wide Web reality. The intertextual linking of the Web means that users move around at the speed of their thinking. So there definitely is "instantaneous exploration." Moreover, Baudrillard is ominously right with the concern over depth. Certainly, we can explore subjects in thorough detail when using the Web, but... do we? What, really, do we retain from all that pointing and clicking and descending further and further into hierarchies?

Baudrillard's ideas on explosion and implosion also have interesting implication for the Internet. In his philosophy, reality has reached its saturation point and has exploded. Now, we have the reverse, an implosion The evolution of the Internet has proceeded along a similar trajectory. At first, there was a growing amount of freely-available information on-line. Then, this info-overload exploded at some point. What we have now is an implosion of information, with many sites restricted "to members only" and a rising amount of censorship. So the more information is put on the Internet, the less chance it has of being accessible by all. We will soon see which is growing faster -- information or restrictions to it...

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