Summary of the Internet Blog

1 TAKE THE LONG VIEW

“We're living through a radical transformation of our communications environment”

A thought experiment -> Comparison between Gutenberg’s printing press and the internet and how after 17 years no one knows how profound the impact would be. With the internet becoming so big, businesses may be at threat. Print journalists and their employers want to know what's going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others.

2 THE WEB ISN'T THE NET

The web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.

3 DISRUPTION IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

In the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, the lead designers, were faced with two difficult tasks: how to design a system that seamlessly links lots of other networks, and how to design a network that is future-proof -> by implementing these twin protocols

4 THINK ECOLOGY, NOT ECONOMICS

Life was now morphing into an ecosystem in which billions of smaller species consume, transform, aggregate or break down and exchange information goods in much smaller units – and in which new gigantic life-forms (Google, Facebook) are emerging.

5 COMPLEXITY IS THE NEW REALITY

Our emerging information environment is more complex – in terms of numbers of participants, the density of interactions between them, and the pace of change – than anything that has gone before. This complexity is not an aberration or something to be wished away: it's the new reality, and one that we have to address.

6 THE NETWORK IS NOW THE COMPUTER

Transition from a world in which the PC really was the computer, to one in which the network is effectively the computer. Data stored on the cloud rather than networks.

 “Sleepwalking into this brave new world”

7 THE WEB IS CHANGING

Web has gone through at least three phases of evolution – from the original web 1.0, to the web 2.0 of "small pieces, loosely joined" (social networking, mashups, webmail, and so on) and is now heading towards some kind of web 3.0 – a global platform based on Tim Burners-lee 's idea of the 'semantic web'

8 HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE

Neil Postman predicted that the insights of two writers would, like a pair of bookends, bracket our future. Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.

The net has been a profoundly liberating influence in our lives – creating endless opportunities for information, entertainment, pleasure, delight, communication, and apparently effortless consumption

9 OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME IS NO LONGER FIT FOR PURPOSE

Digital technology has provided internet users with software tools which make it trivially easy to copy, edit, remix and publish anything that is available in digital form. As a result, millions of people have become "publishers" in the sense that their creations are globally published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube.