The question arises of why the internet is being broken into fragmented islands and what impact does this have on society and specifically our students as they utilize the web more and more in their personal and academic careers? And what responsibility does this place upon the educator as she/he utilizes the internet in their classrooms?

“In order to find his own self, (a person) also needs to live in a milieu where the possibility of many different value systems is explicitly recognized and honored. More specifically, he needs a great variety of choices so that he is not misled about the nature of his own person.” Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language

“While the internet has the potential to decentralize knowledge and control, in practice it’s concentrating control over what we see and what opportunities we’re offered in the hands of fewer people than ever before.”

What impact does the lack of awareness of missed opportunities and missed information have on our students? Are our students being allowed to fully explore their beliefs, opinions, and/or thoughts on the world? Or are they being caught in fragmented islands of information that does not allow them to explore diverse opinions and perspectives?

The vision or goal we should hope to achieve comes from a famous volume called A Pattern of Language. In this book they focused on the question of why did some cities work and others didn’t? They go on to discuss how they imagined two different cities, the heterogeneous city (where people are mixed together irrespective of lifestyle and background), and the city of ghettos (where people are grouped together tightly by category).

As the comparison is made between these cities and our networked lives through the web, the author suggests the answer lies with a happy medium which he called a MOSAIC OF SUBCULTURES.