Love the hat, and the jacket, maybe it's a whistle! Anyway, sartorial faint-heartedness aside, a nice balance by Howard Rheingold.
A positive view of the network.
One of the first questions that arose from my earliest experiences online was the question of why people in online communities should spend so much time answering each other's questions, solving each other's problems, without financial compensation...and the explosion of creativity
...that followed the debut of the Web in 1993 was made possible by deliberate design decisions on the part of the Internet's architects−the end-to-end principle, built into the TCP/IP protocols that make the Internet possible, which deliberately decentralizes the power to innovate, to build something new and even more powerful on what already exists.We have lived long enough to realise that there are dangers.
A population with broadband infrastructure and ubiquitous computing could be a captive audience for a cultural monopoly, given enough bad laws and judicial rulings. A population that knows what to do with the tools at hand stands a better chance of resisting enclosure. The more people who know how to use participatory media to learn, inform, persuade, investigate, reveal, advocate and organize, the more likely the future infosphere will allow, enable and encourage liberty and participation. Such literacy can only make action possible, however−it is not in the technology, or even in the knowledge of how to use it, but in the ways people use knowledge and technology to create wealth, secure freedom, resist tyranny.Resisting enclosure, resisting tyranny.
A very powerful image.
