The Internet makes you smart. The Internet makes you stupid. The Internet is killing the content industry. The Internet is enabling the content industry. The noise about the good and bad things the Internet is doing is so pervasive, who knows what to believe anymore?
John Naughton at The Guardian takes a good look at the fear and uncertainty surrounding the Internet, and posts a list of nine talking points to consider about the Internet to cut through all the confusion.
It’s a bit long to summarize, but part of it is that we’re still too close to the Internet revolution to see the full extent of the effects it will have on society. Just as it took decades or even centuries for the full impact of the Gutenberg printing press to be realized, it make be years at the least before we know the full impact of the Internet.
Another part is that the Internet was designed from the ground up to be potentially disruptive to the rest of the world. Because it was created only to distribute information and to have no central control, it is essentially, Naughton says, “a global machine for springing surprises.” The web, Napster, YouTube, Google…because of the agnosticism of the Internet’s basic architecture, practically anything and everything is possible.
And our ideas about intellectual property are “no longer fit for purpose” when so much of our social discourse is powered by machines and networks that make copies automatically as part of their ordinary day-to-day operation. Copyright laws badly need revision, the better to codify what the real limits are in our technological brave new world.
In a related note, Terry Heaton at the “AR&D: Reinventing Local Media” blog takes a look at the evolving user paradigm of the web. [Note: that is the correct URL, but it seems entirely safe for work apart from the site name.]
He notes that the reason AOL lost out to the web is that any structure that attempts to organize information is going to lose out when compared to a search system that “organizes information ‘on the way out.’” Any organized index is going to lose out compared to a system that can itself organize relevant results from the entire web. As users evolve, they keep wanting more.
Heaton says that Apple, with its walled garden, runs the risk of running into those same limitations when compared to a company like Google whose whole point is to “enable evolving users.”
This reminds me of what Naughton said about the Internet being so disruptive because it is designed with no central control, no chokepoint that can decide what users can and cannot do. Apple’s hardware might be amazing, and its user interface terrific, but that central control is going to be a limitation that the Internet as a whole has not had.
And that lack of control on the Internet as a whole has been responsible for so many of the advancements we take for granted today.
It’s something to think about, anyway.
