Let me start by noting that I didn't find much in this article to disagree with. I often think about what an amazing invention the internet is, as if it were the culmination of civilization's 5000 year journey in information gathering, and at the same time it's only the very beginning of a strange and exciting new era in human evolution. Kevin Kelly's enthusiasm is not lost on me. Even though open source software, social networking, and interactive web sites are all a developing branch of this fairly new medium, the invention that has the most significance for me is without a doubt Wikipedia. When Kelly talks about the internet as a vast compendium of human knowledge, I immediately think of the ever evolving encyclopedia. For me, this is the essence of what the internet is all about. Google searches can give you leads into finding information on just about any topic, but more often than not you will have to troll through a number of amateurish web sites as well as sites that are completely of the mark before finding the information you're looking for. As of 2007, English Wikipedia had over 1.6 million articles, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, eclipsing even the Yongle Encyclopedia (1407), which held the record for nearly 600 years. Clearly something cataclysmic has taken place when a 600 year old publication has been displaced as the largest single source of reference material on the planet.
People often cite the fact that Wikipedia is a user-generated source of information and therefore it can't be trusted. This to me sounds like the sort of talk that might have been heard at the time of the Magna Carta. I ask why a narrow committee of authors that publish the Encyclopedia Britannica should have the final say on what truth is. The internet has broken the stranglehold on information that a select info-monarchy has held for a long time. Wikipedia is an information democracy. If there is debate over an entry's veracity, the reader is informed of this controversy at the entry's outset in big bold letters. If you're engaged in an in-depth research project it's probably best to go the library and seek out primary sources. However, there are innumerable times in a given week where I am looking for essential information. I don't need primary sources every time I want to find out the full meaning of an acronym I've come across in a magazine or the definition of the word Meme. I can go straight to Wikipedia and be confident that I'm not getting some controversial and biased definition.
Thanks to blogs, message boards, and comments sections, the internet has become a vast sewing circle where people can discuss their opinions on any issue. We see this reflected in the rapidly changing state of politics today. The days when a candidate could refute something he or she has said in the past are over. The instant a candidate claims that their past position is in perfect harmony with their current position a barrage of blogs posting YouTube videos of a 1989 stump speech for state senate reveals them to be the dirty liars that they are. The funny thing is that many of them haven't caught on to the fact that the internet is now the ultimate harbinger of truth, and they continue to step into these traps merely because they are running on instinct. The democratic nature of the internet means that truth is always out there, and with 600 billion blogs generating information everyday, the truth is likely to spill out somewhere.
Of course with such a large number of eyes and hands working together it is inevitable that no matter what the platform, someone is going to try to make money. Wikimedia is a non-profit organization that relies heavily on private donations. Other costly sites are not so lucky. Kelly talks about the surprising fact that established media conglomerates like ABC are now aging dinosaurs and that new and exciting media companies like Yahoo! and Google are the champions of the day. But this is merely evolution. In a few years Yahoo! and Google will be the media dinosaurs looking to solidify their place in the market. How do we know that they won't eventually turn to censorship and proprietary backends? My feeling is that this will happen eventually unless these companies are able to stay on the forefront of innovation. You tend to get less squeamish about keeping things open source when you're making money hand over fist.
But one of the reasons I'm not too worried about the internet becoming a closed-source pay-as-you-go toll booth plaza is its proven track record for adaptation, especially in the case of file sharing. There was a big fight a few years back when Napster seemed to be stealing money out of the pockets of music industry fat cats, so they decided to throw lawyers at the problem instead of adjusting their business model. With hindsight we now see what a fatal mistake that was. The internet is so malleable that no number of lawyers are going to be able to stop a planet full of people who desire to share content. Napster as a P2P platform died and became a pay service. No one uses it. In its place, BitTorrent and innumerable other systems have filled the gap, and songs are traded in the same volume they were in Napster's heyday. It might take some getting used to, but the internet seems like it will always bend to the will of the mob and not the power of the few.
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