Connecting the Dots (Part 1)
Building upon my previous two posts, I’d like to take the discussion a bit further, and tie them together with some things I’ve mentioned in the blog earlier this semester. So let’s start with the basic argument that the Internet is now capable of fostering greater international economic trade and development… however, if we wish to effectively utilize these new partnerships and resources, vastly differing cultures need to be able to communicate. There is still a language barrier, as well as the existence of the “Digital Divide”, as previously discussed in class.
All is not perfect with these new international online communities, but some are forming along distinct parallels to other widely successful Internet portals and websites. In the case of Global Voice, the “filtering structure” for content is formed much along the same lines as Wikipedia… however, with a smaller community of “experts” from which to draw upon blog data. The network is expandable, and should be able to handle vastly more traffic than it currently does. Conversely, the Academy for Educational Development’s (AED) Global Learning Portal (http://www.glp.net) works based upon a peer review structure very similar to those used for scientific papers and journals around the world.
These communities stand in stark contrast to a vast wasteland of Internet communities which have recently been gobbled up by large multinational corporations. MySpace, once an “underground” website for users wishing to share hobbies, ideas, and blogs was bought by Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. just last year (2005). There is an obvious commercial market for blogging communities, however, how well can these communities be trusted? Given the scope of the GAO report on the government’s use of 3rd party contractors to inadequately protect citizens’ information and the number of scandals which have recently plagued online banking and credit card sites, how advisable is it to trust a large multi-armed corporation with your most private thoughts?
People need alternative and free methods of communicating with one and other. This basic human neccessity has been seen time and again with recent examples such as MP3 (music) piracy and VoIP… and even moreso throughout the history of the Internet (see my “Blogs I Barely Knew Ye” entry for more on this). I believe that if corporate entities continue to prove to consumers that they cannot be trusted with our data, then more and more people will move to open-source or community-driven solutions for their blogging needs, be they as “important” as global political issues, or as mundane as a good recipe for chocolate fudge.