[Vision2020] Open source and related concepts

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Tuesday 08 April 2008 01:31, Ted Moffett wrote:
<snip>
> It is well known that porno is one of the dominant activities on the
> Internet.  Now there's egalitarian political liberation for you!

Blue-pencil rewrites of Internet history are better relegated to alternate 
worlds sites and fantasy fan-fiction devotees. Actually, financial profits 
from widespread distribution of multiple graphics formats motivated and 
enabled the physical build-out of earlier versions of Internet structure. 
The engineers who designed and built expansions of the early core of the 
Internet, and the early customers of those businesses that financed large 
portions of that early expansion, likely were not, and may still not be, 
individuals with passionate interests in government, politics, economics, 
justice, and various other social science concerns.

> What 
> a diversion from the responsible investigations that should have concerned
> every citizen about Iraq WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda, during the 2002 run up
> to this disastrous and cruel war!

Perhaps. Even though many of us assume the well-developed existence of the 
Internet and the World Wide Web, and expect almost everyone has access and 
some degree of net and web literacy and ability, the facts are that a lot 
of people are still relative newcomers and novices to using available web 
resources. Some of those folks' Internet insecurity (in more than one 
sense) mitigates against their ready participation in substantive Internet 
activities. And, though the situation is changing, it's still true that Web 
users are generally younger, and generally younger often means not yet as 
interested in public matters as older folks who participate in the polity.

On the other hand, think about this -- it's only a couple of years before a 
generation that has known only Bill Clinton and the junior Bush as 
President will start college. They may be digitally dexterous, but have 
they any civics cluefullness? How will the generation that grew up with 
myspace, facebook, and youtube understand political participation? Perhaps 
this question is being answered in our contemporary headlines.


Ken


Ken