|
|
The Net is becoming less and less a thing and more and more an environment. It's going to be all over the place. People are going to do things in it, instead of keeping it in boxes, like packaged software. Imagine that suddenly water showed up in a world where we had drinking water‹but before we had rivers, oceans, swimming pools, et cetera‹and suddenly water changed from being this little thing in a glass or in a bottle, and suddenly it started being all over the world, and you could travel on it, you could fly over it, you could fish out of it, and you could grow things in it.
But people can get overexcited. We're still not talking about telepathy. We're talking about the traditional boundary between me and you. I still need to put things into words. I can show you pictures, but there's still a distinction between me and somebody else. However, the channel between us has changed: it has become much more efficient, broader, and cheaper. What's happened also concerns the whole notion of interactivity. The fact that you can send as easily as you can receive makes a huge difference. A new kind of community, not a culture, is coming. The difference between a culture and a community is that a culture is one-way‹you can absorb it by reading it, by watching it‹but you have to invest back in a community. Absent this return investment, it's not really a community. People will be investing in sharing content and sending messages to each other, in spending time together, and, in part, that's what builds these communities.
Data differs from information. You can gather infinite sets of data with machines, but in order to convert data into information, a human mind has to process that data set and find it meaningful.
The key to thinking about the Internet is this: the Internet changes the economies of scale in favor of the little guy. It used to be only big guys could send stuff, only big guys could advertise, only big guys could have newspapers. Suddenly everybody can reach the audience they deserve, more or less for free. They won't necessarily get a mass audience, because they may not be good enough, or they may not be worth listening to, but everybody can distribute their information pretty much as widely as they want, almost without cost.
The Net dramatically changes the economics of content. Because it allows us to copy content essentially for free, although may be illegal. However, the Net poses interesting challenges for owners, creators, sellers, and users of intellectual property. In this new world of the Net, it is easy to copy information but hard to find it. It is easy to program software to solve problems but hard to define those problems and questions precisely. Digitization plus the Internet thus enables the world at large to have access to more information than the greatest libraries in history ever possessed. It is evident such accumulation of information brings the human culture to a critical point. Where the amount of information in the digital environment exponentially grows, it comes with more commercialisation and monopolisation.
What will almost-free software and proliferating content do to commercial markets for content? How will people - writers, programmers, and artists - be compensated for creating value? What business models will succeed in this foreign economy? These seem to be questions that cyber law scholars are facing challenge.
|
|
|
