Comment not the tech, but the way it's used (Score 1) 409
the same agrument has been made about the printing press and the radio at various points in history. mass communications technologies have huge potential to enhance democracy and redefine citizenship-- consider, for example, how the printing press was in many way a technology which enabled the Protestant reformation (or, one could argue, the whole enlightenment).
the hitch that the internet hit, as i see it, is essentially a technological limitation: the need for a gatekeeper. what i mean is that posting a web page is like tacking up your Paine-esge flyer to a lamppost in Times Square. people will see it, sure (whether they will care or not is another debate). but very few will notice it, because it is lost the the clutter of the millions of other flyers. the way we index the internet is through search engines, which saw some of the first corporate influence on the net and suffer from a range of issues, for capitalist bias to simple technical limitations.
the other way to "catalog" the internet is to use sites like slashdot-- but then you have an editor and a moderator and the whole Paine metaphore has vanished.
and besides, can you honestly say that you read news on the indymedia.org wire and believe it before you double-check with corporate outlets? we're trained to see information distribution as very hierarchical and this is difficult to overcome.
coupled with the rapid and unhindered commericialazation of the medium, the choice between clutter and moderation has left internet has become a lot less decentralized in practical terms, a strange irony given its architecture.
the hitch that the internet hit, as i see it, is essentially a technological limitation: the need for a gatekeeper. what i mean is that posting a web page is like tacking up your Paine-esge flyer to a lamppost in Times Square. people will see it, sure (whether they will care or not is another debate). but very few will notice it, because it is lost the the clutter of the millions of other flyers. the way we index the internet is through search engines, which saw some of the first corporate influence on the net and suffer from a range of issues, for capitalist bias to simple technical limitations.
the other way to "catalog" the internet is to use sites like slashdot-- but then you have an editor and a moderator and the whole Paine metaphore has vanished.
and besides, can you honestly say that you read news on the indymedia.org wire and believe it before you double-check with corporate outlets? we're trained to see information distribution as very hierarchical and this is difficult to overcome.
coupled with the rapid and unhindered commericialazation of the medium, the choice between clutter and moderation has left internet has become a lot less decentralized in practical terms, a strange irony given its architecture.
