First Post
I am looking forward to using this blog as a way of exploring the Internet and its impact on businesses, governments, the publishing industry, and on many other parts of our personal and work lives.
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When I first started using the Internet I had already spent many years of my life reading books, newspapers, magazines, etc. and initially saw the net as the world’s greatest library. I knew how the dewey decimal system worked, I remembered the hours spent searching through periodical indexes or going blind reading microfiche. Compared to that searching this new world seemed instant, limitless but somehow still very personal (maybe because there weren’t that many of us – don’t know).
I was in awe. A new era had been born. Free information for everyone. Of course that wasn’t completely true, ask Google, but this idea remained as my mental simulation of what the internet was all about for several years. I was still using my old carefully constructed frameworks for thinking about something that was busy tearing that framework down right around me, or at the very least, rebuilding that framework into something that was quickly becoming unrecognizable.
Time went on and I got caught up in the daily business of running an ISP in Western Washington and after dealing with pedophiles, spammers, crackers, and the MPAA, really started to become disillusioned with what I saw happening on/to the net. I thought that I was watching the internet become a tool of the entertainment industry and a new playground for marketing – basically “New and Improved” TV. And I still think part of it is – I don’t think that can be stopped and really I just have to let it go. It is just human after all.
Then I reminded my self that the net is young and still very dynamic and I saw things happening that gave me great hope. People taking the net back for themselves (part of it anyway – that’s the beauty right?). People changing the way they interact with the net and the other people on the net. They are rejecting the ‘passive’ use of the internet as a medium for gaining access to and simply absorbing what is put there by someone else. These people are taking an active, very active, role in opening up this amazing tool to very personal, very two way, conversations. Participating in an exchange of the immediacy of now. Nice. A shift in the balance of power. A shift in the movement of information on the net. A dynamic back and forth exchange between many people. Right now (and not IRC, b).
There will certainly be many dead-end side trips and bumps in the road as this thing, like all things, evolves. But our opportunity to be a part of this evolution, a part of the shaping of governmental ethics through the transparent eyes of their citizens, a part of the exchange of ideas as they appear now (many crazy, some great), a part of the attempt to somehow make sense of this crushing amount of information that we are confronted with daily, this opportunity, this amazing gift, is something that we need to embrace with the same joy that we embraced learning how to walk and talk.
In the same way that movable type changed the world we live in now the internet will continue to change the coming world.
It is really up to us to decide where that change will take us.
ken