15 years ago Tim Berners-Lee posted this on a Usenet group and the World Wide Web was born. Today, the number of web pages is thought to be at least 3 trillion - rising by 25,000 every hour. But like a lot of technologies, it's the resulting change in human attitudes that are most interesting and just starting to be appreciated as the Web 2.0 mega-tanker picks up speed. In last week's FT (via Confused) James Boyle, an American law professor, suggests that we are trained to understand the economics of closed economic systems and that makes it difficult for most of us to see the opportunities presented by massive public, open forums. Boyle suggests that, like pilots...
...who have to be trained to rely on their instruments to fly through bad
weather rather than trust their own judgement, we need to challenge our
inbuilt drive to hold onto our own little bit of yard. "Partly this is because we still do not understand the kind of property
that exists on networks. Most of our experience is with tangible
property; fields that can be overgrazed if outsiders cannot be excluded."
Comments