(ORIGINAL ARTICLE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/20/internet-everything-need-to-know)
[1]
Take the Long View
Hard
to tell when actually in the revolution, we will realise and won’t be able to
tell the impact until it becomes the past. We don’t live with hindsight - we don’t
know where the internet will take us next. But people tend to overestimate new
and upcoming technologies and underestimate their long term implications. New
technologies change the world we live in. People want to know whats going to
happen with the internet now, but wont really find out until its too late.
[2]
The Web isn’t the Net
The
internet and web are different things. The internet is an infrastructure of
which everything runs. Web pages amongst other things – music, software, email,
etc – are the traffic. In 10 years time there will be more types of traffic running
on the internet. Internet is much bigger than the web.
[3]
Disruption is a Feature, not a Bug
Cerf
and Kahn were faced with; how to seamlessly interlink lots of networks and how
to design one that is future proof. Their solution – there’s no central
ownership or control and that it wont be optimised for a specific application.
They “created what was essentially a global machine for springing
surprises.” Tim Berners-Lee, in 1991 put the code on
an internet server without having to ask anyone's permission. Ten years after Shawn Fanning spent six months writing software
for sharing music files, in 1999, he called it Napster and it acquired over 60
million users before the music industry managed to shut it down. Uring this,
people began to create spam, exploits and malware.
[4]
Think Ecology, Not Economics
Our
media ecosystem has become more complex, its expanding rapidly. “it has millions of publishers; billions of active,
web-savvy, highly informed readers, listeners and viewers; innumerable
communication channels, and a dizzying rate of change.”
[5] Complexity is the new reality
Our emerging information environemt is more
complex (numbers of participants, the density of interactions between them, and
the pace of change). It is a new reality we have to address. Behaviour of
complex systems is hard to control and predict.
[6] The network is now the computer
Standalone computer began to get integrated
into a network making them part of something. First, the companies like Yahoo,
Google, Microsoft provided search also began to offer "webmail" It doesn’t
actually run on your computer. Google
then offered word-processing, spreadsheets, slide-making and other
"office"-type services over the network. Network computing has lead
to the emergence of cloud computing. The raises an issue on security and
privacy.
[7]
The web is changing
the web has gone through at
least three phases of evolution – from the original web 1.0, to the web 2.0 of
"small pieces, loosely joined" (social networking, mashups, webmail,
and so on) and is now heading towards some kind of web 3.0 - a global
platform based on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the
'semantic web' (where web pages will contain enough metadata about their
content to enable software to make informed judgements about their relevance
and function). It’s no longer just a publication medium.
[8] Huxley and Orwell are the bookends of our
future
Aldous Huxley believed that we would be
destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be
destroyed by the things we fear. The net has been a profoundly
liberating influence in our lives – creating endless opportunities for
information, entertainment, pleasure, delight, communication, and apparently
effortless consumption, especially for the young generation. Other critics are
worried that incessant internet use is actually rewiring our brains. The internet is the nearest thing to a perfect
surveillance machine the world has ever seen. Everything you do on the net is
logged. Could be used as a tool for a totalitarian government interested
in the behaviour, social activities.
[9] Our intellectual property regime is no
longer fit for purpose. In the digital world, copying is effortless and perfect.
When you view a web page, for example, a copy of the page is loaded into the
video memory of your computer (or phone, or iPad) before the device can display
it on the screen. So you can't even look at something on the web without
(unknowingly) making a copy of it. Digital technology has provided
internet users with software tools which make it easy to copy, edit, remix and
publish anything that is available in digital form. Their creations are
globally published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube, therefore,
you can find material that infringes copyright in one way or another.
