The Internet Paradox
Posted on March 14, 2007
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
I’ve been having a little discussion wtih Conor and before him Shel Israel. I thought I’d post some to the front page see if anybody wants to join in.
In the summer I met with Rick Segal (the friendly venture capitalist) and Shel Israel who wrote Naked Conversations, along with Robert Scoble. I don’t know why geek culture played as prominent a role as it did in my own little life back in 2006. Perhaps because I would have loved to start up a new media enterprise and I was game to talk with anyone. Rick and Shel though did disturb me, an observation I shared with other Cork people who had their own take on it but had largely the same feelings.
Shel: I’m surprised and disappointed to learn that either Rick’s comments or my energy disturb you. That being said, Ricks vision of citizen journalists forming a global network are not his alone. it is a vision shared not just by a great many blog and social media thinkers, but also the big players in traditional media. The BBC, Reuters and most recently, the Economist are working on systems to braid “global locals” into a media reporting and commentary system. I’ve recently talked with some Big Media types and they admit that bloggers can be extremely cheap help to Big Media.
Haydn: So where are my reservations? I was looking again recently at the IT paradox debate - the argument that despite the trillions of investment in IT there’s little discernible payoff to western economies. Yet the IT community continues to behave like an independent global republic continually advocating and proselytising new techniques, new innovations that aren’t grounded in any one culture nor necessarily relevant to them.
Conor: I’ve spent all my life as a techie and genuinely get excited when I see new ideas and innovations. However it is always tempered by my asking “what use is it?”. Many times, the original use is just someone scratching an itch but it turns into something globally interesting and useful (email, the web, RSS), other times it turns out to be a pile of irrelevant nonsense e.g. almost anything to come out of Media Lab.
Each new advance on the internet has brought [ ] communities closer and given them access to the world. Blogging adds to that in a very powerful way by giving individual producers in the most remote regions the ability to tell the world about themselves in their own voices.
End result - improvement in quality of life, standard of living and preservation of culture.
Haydn: Massive global movements have grown and thrived without computer networks, some good some bad. fascism, socialism, humanism. People don’t need a lot of technology in order to connect.
Conor: The tools of global communication are no longer just in the hands of the middle classes who would have promoted socialism/fascism/humanism in the past but are now accessible for minimal cost to anyone who can read and write.
That is a huge sea-change in where ideas come from and how the creators of those ideas can access the world without filters. No well-intentioned publishing houses or well-travelled journalists, just people on the ground letting the world know about themselves and finding out about the world.
I’ll leave it there for now - be interested in what people think though. It’s something I hope to write about in the newspaper. I was hoping in the debatee to challenge some of our received wisdom about the web.
It the internet communications progress
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2 Responses to “The Internet Paradox”
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I think u’re right 2 ask “So whats’s the benefit”
Open outside geekie circles a lot of what ‘we’ do as little impact on the masses. U have a better feel 4 that.
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