Today on the radio: Do we deserve the Internet?
It’s my last time on Radio New Zealand National for a while, and I thought I’d use it to address some more a philosophical question than I often do. I’ve written a separate post with my ideas below.
I’ll be on air after the 11am news. You can listen live, or soon afterwards you will be able to pull the podcast or download the audio as ogg or mp3.
I remember the cyberpunk euphoria of the mid-1990s, and John Gilmore’s famous “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.
It’s true governments have had a bit more success regulating the Internet than we might have expected. But on the other hand they haven’t had complete success, as those reports leaking out of Iran showed.
What’s different about the Internet, as compared to any other communication medium like the telephone, the postal service, radio, TV or whatever, is that it alone puts the intelligence at the edges, instead of in the middle. That is what has made it so adaptable to a continual stream of new applications.
Comment by Lawrence D'Oliveiro — 11 March 2010 @ 11:43 am