A few weeks ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee made the case for free data access for all, promoting the libertarian ideals of the early Web pioneers. As I remarked in my response, this is a wonderful idea, but it’s unrealistic: technologically, a free and open platform could generate a knowledge-sharing revolution reminiscent of the printing press, the telegraph and the television; socially, once you add the fallible human beings into the mix, such phenomenal freedom would be co-opted and corrupted, twisted by the various -isms that we project into virtuality. And unfortunately, this is where issues of data control gets messy and a little bit personal.
digital revolution
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[Digital Revolution] Liberty, Wikipedia and a voice for all
Tuesday July 21, 2009 @ 01:26 PM (UTC)The web is a levelling ground, founded on libertarian ideals of openness, freedom and a democratisation of information and knowledge. This has been replicated again and again, throughout the web’s history, in projects like the WELL, the WikiWikiWeb and, now, Wikipedia.
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[Digital Revolution] DigRev launch
Monday July 20, 2009 @ 06:17 PM (UTC)Check out the video of the Digital Revolution launch: Tim Berners-Lee, Susan Greenfield, Bill Thompson (who offers his mobile number) and yours truly on policing, privacy and potential.
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[Digital Revolution] What's become of the blogosphere?
Wednesday July 15, 2009 @ 10:06 AM (UTC)The blogsophere is dying, apparently. The long tail of user-generated content, brimming with idiosyncrasy and experimentation – the great hope of the libertarian levelling ground promoted by the Web’s founding fathers – is petering out. The anecdotal 1% of content creators (versus the 99% of content consumers) is moving away from the more formal end of story-telling/reporting (a process that takes time to craft, link, illustrate and post) because they prefer to keep in touch using quick-fire, low-cost tools like Twitter and Facebook. The result is a ghost town – nay, a ghost metropolis – of blogs that are, well, dead.
Oh the fickle, fickle Web. Oh the Ridalin-smoking, post-MTV, fast-edit generation. What have you done to our new media revolution? Don’t you realise that in your absence, the new media mega corps are stepping in to perpetuate the old media models, to establish Old Boy hierarchies and to open and close the gates of information at their whims and inclinations?
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