Evaluation
The digital environments that have grown in recent years, somewhat exponentially as well, have allowed much innovation in the way people communicates and forms ideas and institutions. This growth has hit both negative and positive feedback alike, but overall the trend is towards a better experience of the digital world for everyone across the globe. Whether it takes the Internet to become dull, like Charles Leadbeater suggests, to become more effective overall is yet to be seen.
As any system grows, and contains a human-made working environment, noise is introduced. This needs to not be seen as a bad thing, as many of the things you could immediately regard as rubbish may become part of something great in the future. This is the way the Internet works the best, where information is linked and cross referenced constantly, so one no longer needs to apply the traditional methods of research or creation of ideas. Everyones voice is available to you instantly, and on the most part for free. The human part would be lost if the Internet was cleansed of things people considered inappropriate.
Rupert Murdoch wants to turn the trend of free on its head, and revert to something more similar to the traditional industries of the past in terms of payment models. It’s fair to say that people should make money from their work towards quality journalism and the like, but a changing world should mean you innovate rather than lock down. Google have proven there is money in the Internet, it just requires you to look at the situation in a different way. These two figures in the news industry are head to head at the moment because they disagree which model is right for the Internet, but in the end it will be up to the consumer and their choice of where and how they want to get the news.
Changing a trend which has greatly accelerated this past decade will be very hard to do. Everyone receives their information in small chunks, one at a time. be that by RSS feeds, or Twitter, up-to-date and crowd sourced news and information is redly available to you. Even the White House has a twitter feed, so they can keep up with the trend setting populace. Even if Twitter is just a fad, there will be the next thing and the next thing to follow that.
These social networking sites to come of some good, even if most of the infrastructure available is used to play time wasting games, or constantly give up to minute updates of your day to day lives. Art can be created in this forum, allowing projects to span countries and communities, no longer forcing groups to be contained around art centres like Paris or London. People can be helped by the online communities they are part of because locally people don’t have the knowledge, or more likely they people asking for help find it easier to ask anonymously.
Even if Rupert Murdoch says that ‘the Internet will soon be over’, (http://www.theequitykicker.com/2009/05/08/the-current-days-of-the-internet-will-soon-be-over-rupert-murdoch/) it most certainly will prevail in this form, there are too many people who benefit from the open-ness of the Internet, too many people willing to make a large effort in order for this not to happen.
@2 years ago#digitalenvironments
