Over the past few weeks, we’ve been rather po-facedly debating the contemporary Nation-State: one union under the World Wide Web, facilitated by the Internet, threatening the sovereignty of modern political structures. Now, we’re going to turn the tables and look at what the Web is doing to us. No, not along the lines that Internet- sceptics like Baronness Susan Greenfield propose (we’ll be getting into that in our final programme), but at what we are giving up of ourselves to the people behind the websites every time we go online.
BBC
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[Digital Revolution] We bought the e-ticket, we're taking the ride
Monday August 24, 2009 @ 08:39 PM (UTC) -
[Digital Revolution] Two ways to destroy the web: hack it or cut it
Tuesday August 18, 2009 @ 08:33 PM (UTC)In 1995, in the summer before I moved to the UK, I was living just outside the Washington D.C. Beltway, not far away from the world headquarters of America Online. In those days, AOL ruled the roost; in the States at least, they dominated the commercial world wide web home market, and had a pretty solid stake in the business ISP world too.
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[Digital Revolution] The rise of the eNation
Thursday August 06, 2009 @ 09:17 AM (UTC)The nation-state, argued Bill Thompson at the Web@20 event that launched the Digital Revolution project, is an outdated phenomenon. The World Wide Web is engendering trans-national identities based on communities of practice not tied to traditional forms of governance, he claimed. This revolution is powerful and is changing our politics at such an unprecedented speed that it will topple traditional social structures.
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[Digital Revolution] Piracy - what's your line?
Monday July 27, 2009 @ 08:32 PM (UTC)A few weeks ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee made the case for free data access for all, promoting the libertarian ideals of the early Web pioneers. As I remarked in my response, this is a wonderful idea, but it’s unrealistic: technologically, a free and open platform could generate a knowledge-sharing revolution reminiscent of the printing press, the telegraph and the television; socially, once you add the fallible human beings into the mix, such phenomenal freedom would be co-opted and corrupted, twisted by the various -isms that we project into virtuality. And unfortunately, this is where issues of data control gets messy and a little bit personal.
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[Digital Revolution] Liberty, Wikipedia and a voice for all
Tuesday July 21, 2009 @ 01:26 PM (UTC)The web is a levelling ground, founded on libertarian ideals of openness, freedom and a democratisation of information and knowledge. This has been replicated again and again, throughout the web’s history, in projects like the WELL, the WikiWikiWeb and, now, Wikipedia.
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[Digital Revolution] DigRev launch
Monday July 20, 2009 @ 06:17 PM (UTC)Check out the video of the Digital Revolution launch: Tim Berners-Lee, Susan Greenfield, Bill Thompson (who offers his mobile number) and yours truly on policing, privacy and potential.
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[Digital Revolution] What's become of the blogosphere?
Wednesday July 15, 2009 @ 10:06 AM (UTC)The blogsophere is dying, apparently. The long tail of user-generated content, brimming with idiosyncrasy and experimentation – the great hope of the libertarian levelling ground promoted by the Web’s founding fathers – is petering out. The anecdotal 1% of content creators (versus the 99% of content consumers) is moving away from the more formal end of story-telling/reporting (a process that takes time to craft, link, illustrate and post) because they prefer to keep in touch using quick-fire, low-cost tools like Twitter and Facebook. The result is a ghost town – nay, a ghost metropolis – of blogs that are, well, dead.
Oh the fickle, fickle Web. Oh the Ridalin-smoking, post-MTV, fast-edit generation. What have you done to our new media revolution? Don’t you realise that in your absence, the new media mega corps are stepping in to perpetuate the old media models, to establish Old Boy hierarchies and to open and close the gates of information at their whims and inclinations? -
[Digital Revolution] The Web is... too good for us?
Saturday July 11, 2009 @ 05:30 PM (UTC)See the original post on the Digital Revolution blog
To free data or not to free data: that is quite a big question. The cases for opening up data are revolutionary: data freedom would utterly transform what we could do for ourselves, for each other, for the world. The cases against are usually wrapped up in the context of commercial ownership, intellectual property and national security.
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