Lately, I realized that I have been spending quite a bit of time on Youtube.com; learning some guitar techniques, watching how-to videos for makeup, and subscribing to couple of Youtube.com comedian’s channel. Instead of downloading music, movie, or TV show files, I search them on Youtube.com, and simply play them. For movies and TV shows, I find the ones that have been parted into five to six parts and watch them online (and surprisingly, for really old black and white films, Youtube.com has many clips that are in good quality). In this sense, I think that digital files can be long lasting, and easily accessible to many people, leading to the idea of “open access”.
As discussed in many articles that were read for our class, I learned that the “open access” system has many pros then the possible cons it may have. Especially, “The Meaning of Open” on the official Google Blog was very convincing. The article emphasized that open access will lead to open information. The words they used, such as value, transparency, and control were almost impressive since I could hardly be critical about their points. However, I finally doubted when they wrote, “bigger is better”. It is true that more information can lead us to more correct ones, but I think that as the information pool gets enormous and too open, it also can be “too easy for others to control” (“Future of the Internet”, pg 2).
Before taking our class I never even thought of the term “open access”. But after learning about it, I knew that I was already familiar with the term since I was always exposed to it. Today, many of us are online constantly and consistently, and when we are online we expect to see no boundaries or limits to the information we can get. Internet is convenient, fast, and accurate in many ways but now I think it is time to ask what we should do regarding the open access system of the Internet, to make the future of the Internet brighter. I think we should all try hard to find the most effective way to keep the balance between openness and regularity.
I hope this is not such a naïve question. Why is Google so pro “Open Access” system and is also trying to convince all of us that Internet should be more open?
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