I don't do this often, but this says what I have wanted to say about social implications of the internet, except it goes further, does it more eloquently and generally gives some really interesting food for thought.
Actually, it's also part of the theory behind crosslinks - kind of a best-of-friendsfriends thing, so people get exposed to content they wouldn't otherwise have seen.
I really enjoy reading 2004_elections because it's really refreshing to get a right-wing point of view on things, to read the articles they read and see why they think the way they do. It's all too easy to go on reading the Independent and Guardian and end up in a trendy Lib Dem ivory tower...
I very rarely do, and when I do it's not usually because of social segregation but because of survival - job protection and all that. I understand you're lucky in your social situation at work :)
One of the reasons I believe in supporting a (decent) public broadcast network like the BBC - broadening my horizons never was so easy.
If only this utopia were reality ;)
Still, it's got to be better than the politically-controlled media outlets in the US. I had hoped the internet would have a larger effect on the election results, but I don't think we're there just yet.
There’s an analogy often made between the American settlers and internet dwellers, and it’s a good one (things like ‘the cyber-frontier’). Like the American settlers, internet dwellers create a myth that there was no politics before they arrived. In order to establish entirely new and egalitarian communities, American settlers had to ignore the fact that the land was already occupied. To the same end, Internet settlers choose to ignore the historical and sociological facts of how the Internet is run, who can't get on to it and why, and the mechanisms used online to divide people. The risk is that the politics of the net follows America towards gated communities, each having only an inward-looking, group-based notion of politics, and ceases to question the macro institutions and systems around them.
Hmm…
I can remember the Good Old Days™, when the Internet was this fantastic thing you could put a packet in and have it arrive wherever in the world you liked, within a second or two. True, it was only accessible to a few privileged academics (as an undergraduate, I had to fight pretty hard for access), but as a result, it was largely self-policing.
Then a few infamous people started messing around — Cantor and Siegal, Serdar Argic, Kent Paul Dolan & co. forced people — us — to start making rules, policing them and enforcing them.
Then commercial internet service providers turned up. A whole bunch of "newbies" suddenly ran headlong into an established Internet culture that hadn't even really noticed that it was there until people started ignoring it. Issues like "netiquette" became far more serious than the occasional funny post by Brad in news.announce.newusers . Prodigy, Netcom, Compuserve, AOL, each wave more contentious than the last.
Then the pornographers, anarchists, terrorists, con-men and kiddy-fiddlers arrived, and noticed this wonderful place, still bound by informal rules, ethics, precedent and common sense. They abused it.
Now, we're faced with governments all over the world scrambling to legislate about music copying, online paedophile porn rings, hacking, viruses, and all the rest of it — even profanity (remember the CDA?). They don't understand how the online world works, so the laws generally suck. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the online world understands how laws work, either.
At the moment, we're stuck in an odd intermediate state where almost everyone in the developed nations has the means to use the Internet, a few can't, a few don't want to, and so on. Some people are trying to treat it as a new era in communication, others as a better way to do the same things as before. Some people regard it as an unregulated means of doing whatever they like, others assume "the government" is in charge of the Internet or can somehow control it, most people are caught in the middle, going with the flow, not quite knowing what to think.
One way or another, the Internet's going to become a whole lot more like real life over the next few years, and that's a shame — it was fun while it lasted.
Unless, of course, those of us who are interested in cryptography and similar technologies manage to keep one step ahead of the global corporations, the criminals and the drooling morons — as typified by criminals spamming, fools giving the spammers enough money to make it worthwhile, and Microsoft messing up attempts to solve the mess with patent encumbrances. It's going to be a close race…
I agree the internet is going to become more like real life, but I think like in the real world there will still be pockets of escapism for those who desire it.
I don't think the internet is going to go one way or the other; there will just be areas which are bad - eg. currently the bad areas could be considered to be the abuse of email and other public messaging services, the signal to noise ratio of decent information available on the net.. etc. Just as one area gets bad, people will find better ways to do things. Many solutions have been suggested for email, some more effective than others, but quite a few involve separating the 'haves' from the 'have-nots' again.
One thing the internet is helping to do is shake up monolithic and beaurocratic organisations like (typically) governments and monopolies in market sectors. The internet can reduce the time it takes for things to happen (for a number of reasons), and opens new ways for money to be exchanged, which puts pressure on companies and governments to keep up. This is a good thing.
Unfortunately, I think the Internet is replacing some monolithic bureaucracies with others, rather than eliminating them. There was a time when the Internet was basically run from Jon Postel's office — that time has passed.
Given time, I fear that Verisign, ICANN, IANA, PayPal, and all the rest will become as powerful as many governments. And as evil, belligerent, power-crazed and obstructive.
Are we really better off with them than with our current "RL" governments? Who can tell. What happens if there's a major test of will between the Internet powers and conventional government at some point? I'm not sure. While it's unlikely to be deadly (unless everything is on the net by then), we still might we'd picked a different planet before they're done.
Are we really better off with them than with our current "RL" governments?
A very interesting question. Currently, whenever these sorts companies have overstepped their marks they've (mostly) been lambasted back into line. Social pressure in the form of commerce and enterprise generally seem to be good at regulating them.
I'm not naive enough to think that will always be the case, but one other good thing is that no one "RL" government can control all aspects of the internet, no matter how hard it tries. This will eventually force (if the internet-running companies prove not to be good enough at self-regulation) some sort of joint committee of countries (NATO anyone?) to regulate the companies. This will undoubtedly be slow and bloated with politics and bureaucracy.
So where does that leave us? Well I suspect the internet will manage itself quite effectively - take the smaller case of CDDB which when it tried to start getting people to pay for the information they had collected for free it backfired and people rebelled and set up freedb in its place. This can and will happen again to any internet-based organisation that gets too big for its boots. It might be more tricky for some parts, but PayPal and the like can and will crumble if people decide to use viable alternatives. Patents are too slow to keep up with the internet world, and by the time a successful patent holder has sued the original application is no longer in place.
I do believe the whole way we do business is going to receive a large shake-up as more and more business is conducted online. Business models will need to change - for example companies will find it difficult to charge for proprietary technology that doesn't cover a niche market; instead I believe the emerging strategy of quality open-source products being adopted for free with varying levels of support being paid for by contract.
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 09:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 09:26 am (UTC)I really enjoy reading
no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 09:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 09:38 am (UTC)If only this utopia were reality ;)
Still, it's got to be better than the politically-controlled media outlets in the US. I had hoped the internet would have a larger effect on the election results, but I don't think we're there just yet.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-09 11:52 am (UTC)Hmm…
I can remember the Good Old Days™, when the Internet was this fantastic thing you could put a packet in and have it arrive wherever in the world you liked, within a second or two. True, it was only accessible to a few privileged academics (as an undergraduate, I had to fight pretty hard for access), but as a result, it was largely self-policing.
Then a few infamous people started messing around — Cantor and Siegal, Serdar Argic, Kent Paul Dolan & co. forced people — us — to start making rules, policing them and enforcing them.
Then commercial internet service providers turned up. A whole bunch of "newbies" suddenly ran headlong into an established Internet culture that hadn't even really noticed that it was there until people started ignoring it. Issues like "netiquette" became far more serious than the occasional funny post by Brad in news.announce.newusers . Prodigy, Netcom, Compuserve, AOL, each wave more contentious than the last.
Then the pornographers, anarchists, terrorists, con-men and kiddy-fiddlers arrived, and noticed this wonderful place, still bound by informal rules, ethics, precedent and common sense. They abused it.
Now, we're faced with governments all over the world scrambling to legislate about music copying, online paedophile porn rings, hacking, viruses, and all the rest of it — even profanity (remember the CDA?). They don't understand how the online world works, so the laws generally suck. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the online world understands how laws work, either.
At the moment, we're stuck in an odd intermediate state where almost everyone in the developed nations has the means to use the Internet, a few can't, a few don't want to, and so on. Some people are trying to treat it as a new era in communication, others as a better way to do the same things as before. Some people regard it as an unregulated means of doing whatever they like, others assume "the government" is in charge of the Internet or can somehow control it, most people are caught in the middle, going with the flow, not quite knowing what to think.
One way or another, the Internet's going to become a whole lot more like real life over the next few years, and that's a shame — it was fun while it lasted.
Unless, of course, those of us who are interested in cryptography and similar technologies manage to keep one step ahead of the global corporations, the criminals and the drooling morons — as typified by criminals spamming, fools giving the spammers enough money to make it worthwhile, and Microsoft messing up attempts to solve the mess with patent encumbrances. It's going to be a close race…
no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 10:01 am (UTC)I don't think the internet is going to go one way or the other; there will just be areas which are bad - eg. currently the bad areas could be considered to be the abuse of email and other public messaging services, the signal to noise ratio of decent information available on the net.. etc. Just as one area gets bad, people will find better ways to do things. Many solutions have been suggested for email, some more effective than others, but quite a few involve separating the 'haves' from the 'have-nots' again.
One thing the internet is helping to do is shake up monolithic and beaurocratic organisations like (typically) governments and monopolies in market sectors. The internet can reduce the time it takes for things to happen (for a number of reasons), and opens new ways for money to be exchanged, which puts pressure on companies and governments to keep up. This is a good thing.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-10 04:56 pm (UTC)Given time, I fear that Verisign, ICANN, IANA, PayPal, and all the rest will become as powerful as many governments. And as evil, belligerent, power-crazed and obstructive.
Are we really better off with them than with our current "RL" governments? Who can tell. What happens if there's a major test of will between the Internet powers and conventional government at some point? I'm not sure. While it's unlikely to be deadly (unless everything is on the net by then), we still might we'd picked a different planet before they're done.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-11 01:19 pm (UTC)A very interesting question. Currently, whenever these sorts companies have overstepped their marks they've (mostly) been lambasted back into line. Social pressure in the form of commerce and enterprise generally seem to be good at regulating them.
I'm not naive enough to think that will always be the case, but one other good thing is that no one "RL" government can control all aspects of the internet, no matter how hard it tries. This will eventually force (if the internet-running companies prove not to be good enough at self-regulation) some sort of joint committee of countries (NATO anyone?) to regulate the companies. This will undoubtedly be slow and bloated with politics and bureaucracy.
So where does that leave us? Well I suspect the internet will manage itself quite effectively - take the smaller case of CDDB which when it tried to start getting people to pay for the information they had collected for free it backfired and people rebelled and set up freedb in its place. This can and will happen again to any internet-based organisation that gets too big for its boots. It might be more tricky for some parts, but PayPal and the like can and will crumble if people decide to use viable alternatives. Patents are too slow to keep up with the internet world, and by the time a successful patent holder has sued the original application is no longer in place.
I do believe the whole way we do business is going to receive a large shake-up as more and more business is conducted online. Business models will need to change - for example companies will find it difficult to charge for proprietary technology that doesn't cover a niche market; instead I believe the emerging strategy of quality open-source products being adopted for free with varying levels of support being paid for by contract.