Welcome back to Trial by Wire! My name is Denton, and today, we're continuing to talk about how to use the Internet. This episode is going to specifically cover the idea of a "website" or "web application" and the different ways in which we use the Internet today. By the end of the episode, you should be able to identify at least a few websites in your life and how you use them. Let's get started!
Last time, we talked about how websites are made of content hosted on a server, addressed by a URL, and accessible by a browser. Websites are the units of the Internet - if you want to use the Internet, you access a website.
However, not all websites are just websites. You may also hear the term "web application" or "web app" thrown around when talking about the Internet. Web apps are similar to websites; the main difference is that they do more. Wikipedia is a good example of a classic website; you can read content, link to other pages, and even edit pages, but you can't do much else. It consists of a series of "web pages", like pages in a book. Each page has text, pictures, and links to other pages. Web apps provide a lot of additional functionality, a lot of which is interaction-based. Users can see live updates to sports events, stream videos, play games, modify spreadsheets, and so on. Basically, web apps are applications on the web, just like you would use on your laptop or your phone.
Web apps are important because of something called "Web 2.0", which is the idea that users of websites and web apps can interact with the Internet in new ways; namely, they can contribute and consume content. Web 2.0 was first coined in 1999, 8 years after the invention of the Internet, by Darcy DiNucci, now the Vice-President of User Experience at Ammunition LLC. However, it really took off in 2004 when publisher Tim O'Reilly organized a conference to discuss the state and future of the web. Web 2.0 is about making content on top of existing websites and web apps instead of constructing your own website. For example, instead of making your own social media site when you want to share something, you can just upload it to Instagram, which already exists. As a side note, you may have also heard the term "Web 3.0" in recent years. That is a whole 'nother can of worms that we'll unpack later on, so stay tuned.
So how are web apps related to Web 2.0? In short, they enable it. The modern Internet is full of sophisticated web apps that let users provide content in so many ways. Making a Facebook post is providing content. Retweeting something on Twitter is providing content. Making a wish list on Amazon is providing content. Initiating an online transfer through your banking site is providing content. Writing a positive review of a podcast is creating content (if, you know, you wanted to do that for this podcast). The philosophy behind all of these is users interacting with the Internet.
Web 2.0 and web apps probably don't seem all that weird if you didn't browse the Internet in its early days. Interacting with others and their content online is just what we do nowadays. In fact, from here on out, I'm just gonna use the term "website" to refer to both websites and web apps because that's how the term is used nowadays. But Web 2.0 came with a major change from Web 1.0: user data became a major part of the Internet. And as the Internet coalesced around this idea, user data began to drive the Internet. Let's take a look at some examples of what that means.
The introduction of user-generated content to the Internet on existing websites creates a number of really interesting ethical problems. You've probably already encountered some of these without even realizing it if you use the Internet regularly. We're going to talk about a few of them at a high level for now since we haven't really gotten into the different kinds of websites yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they come up again in more detail later, so you might want to file these away for now.
First of all, if you're creating content on someone else's website, who owns the content? This may seem like a simple question, but let's consider a non-Internet example. Let's say that you attend a wedding and leave your name and a kind note to the bride and groom in the guest book. Nobody will dispute that you are the author of that note, and the happy couple clearly intended for you to contribute to the book. But, at the end of the day, the newlyweds (or their parents) purchased the book and the pen, and they will be responsible for managing and storing the guestbook for years to come. Now, you would probably take issue if they were to photocopy your note and do other things with it, like trying to forge your handwriting as a way of impersonating you or taking part of it out of context to make you look bad. There may be social or even legal ways to prevent this from happening. But, in some ways, you lost control of your work as soon as you wrote it down on something that someone else owns. You have no signed contract with the couple stating what they can and cannot do with your note.
Some of you may be thinking at this point that this is an imperfect analogy, because nowadays, just about any website which allows users to provide content has some form of contract that you agree to prior to posting. These documents are called "Terms and Conditions" and "Privacy Policies" amongst other things, those documents that you definitely read and understood and certainly didn't just click "agree to" and moved on. Don't worry, you're not alone; I wrote an entire undergraduate thesis on why privacy policies are terrible. Even in this case, though, you're relying on the company and all of its employees to honor that Terms and Conditions, and you're even relying on the stability of the company itself. When RadioShack went bankrupt in 2015, it put its customer data up for auction along with the rest of its intellectual property. If the FTC and several state attorneys general hadn't stepped in, all of that data would have been available to the highest bidder.
The question of ownership leads directly to the next question: is a website allowed to restrict certain kinds of user-generated content on their site? Let's continue our guest book analogy. Say that the uncle of the groom has been consuming a bit too much of a certain substance and happens to get ahold of a pen and some paper to voice his drunken thoughts. Unfortunately, in this case, the paper happens to be the guest book, and the uncle fills it with lengthy soliloquies about his ex-wife and her cheating ways. By the time the best man is able to wrest the book from the uncle's hands, four pages of the book have been covered, and an entire page is dedicated to derogatory comments about the newlyweds borne of jealousy.
In this case, the content generated by the user (the uncle) is likely undesirable to most attendees of the wedding, especially those for whom it matters (the bride and the groom). I can't imagine too many complaints if the best man were to remove those pages from the guest book and toss them in the trash. But, this is a still a subjective judgment being made by the best man. What if he took a bottle of white-out to the book and decided to get rid of any comments that had curse words in them? Or, maybe he hates the bride's entire family and wants to get rid of any comments they've made? Content management is a hard thing to get right, and websites may overstep their bounds in doing so. However, letting all content roam free on the website tends to lead to its own set of problems. Imagine if the groom had to read the unsavory comments about the bride in his own guestbook.
This then leads to our third and final question: is a website responsible for the user-generated content on its site? In our guest book analogy, the uncle's comments are unsavory and inappropriate, and he chose to indulge in the substances which removed his inhibitions about voicing them. However, he is a guest of the groom, presumably the drinks were provided by the wedding, no one appears to have stopped the uncle from drinking (even if he has a history of this behavior when he gets drunk), and the couple did not place any restrictions on what was allowed to be written in the guest book. You could say that the wedding provided a platform for the uncle's thoughts, even though he clearly misinterpreted the point of that platform.
Let's analyze the accountability of the situation. The uncle should clearly be held responsible for his actions: he is an adult, he chose to drink, and he chose to write those nasty comments. However, those in charge of the wedding created an environment which made his actions possible, and perhaps even probable (especially if those in attendance at the wedding encouraged the uncle to drink). Websites are often designed to encourage certain kinds of content and discourage others. Hinge, a popular dating app, does not allow photo uploads in private chats (presumably to stop people from uploading unrequested photos of themselves). Those designs may create some amount of accountability for the site if they encourage unethical or unlawful content.
While user-generated content is an incredible addition to the Internet which has fostered collaboration in community in many ways, it opens a Pandora's box of ethical problems. Keep these questions in your head, because we will likely encounter them again as we explore specific kinds of websites in future episodes.
You may notice that I provided questions and not answers in the last section. That's because I want you to think about your own answers, and that's your homework for today! How should websites which allow user-generated content handle that content? Think about that, and I'll see you next time!
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