Martin,
I agree. I think the internet has an important infrastructure. I guess
what I was trying to get at was like any medium or activity there are
serious contraints. It is not all instrumental in that the internet is this
tool we use for A or B, but that it transforms us and our activity in
central ways. For example Star and Bowker mention in their book that as
part of the interview process they did a search to find if the applicant had
a webpage. The search came up with a lot of stuff including various
postings to newsgroups. Now, when we search for a job do we want all our
newsgroup postings to be part of the public record. We seem to be very
aware of how the internet assists action, but what about its contraints.
Nate
-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Ryder [mailto:mryder@carbon.cudenver.edu]
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 3:12 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: tyranny on the net
Nate,
Your model of electronic dictatorship seems to be based on your experience
putting up a free website (first on GeoCities, now on Yahoo). Your
concern is that the provider claims ownership of the information that you
and other people place on the Yahoo/Geocities resource. If this is a
serious cocern, maybe you should consider moving your information to a
more trusted host? By the way, I think your Vygotsky page is top-notch
and should be welcomed by any number of educational sites. My own work is
hosted at the University of Colorado, despite the fact that I have not
been affiliated with the Universiy for several years.
In the mid '90s, good ol' US law makers elected to give our Internet
infrastructure over to private enterpise, to make it bigger, faster and
more profitable because, after all, 'the business of America is business'.
In true capitalist fashion, the pattern started with many little fish
laying the groundwork, then to be gobbled up by a few bigger ones, and
so on. Not all have been gobbled up yet, and there are still a few honest
mom & pop providers who can offer you safe hosting for your work at a
nominal cost.
One responsible approach for those of us who are concerned about the issue
you raise is to support the concept of community free nets. While many of
these local and rural networks are commercially sponsored, many others
survive on community financial support and volunteerism.
Also, there are progressive organizations such as The Electronic Frontier
Foundation whose mission is the preservation of the civil liberties we now
enjoy online. The EFF embraces what they call a "common carriage"
principle requiring that network providers carry all speech, regardless of
its controversial content. They actively lobby and organize resistance
against measures that threaten free speech on line. The EFF is a
respected voice for the rights of Internet users and they invite concerned
netizens to join them in the fight to preserve our online civil liberties.
One of our greatest defenses against the electronic tyranny to which you
allude is the fundamental distributed architecture of the Iternet itself.
If one provider squelches a voice of freedom, there are two or three other
sites that will carry the message. While some of the high-speed pipelines
might be controlled by a single entity, there is no single control
mechanism for the entire network. When attempts to squelch a message are
exercised at any specific locale, there are always alternate entry points
into this amorphous network. In the worst-case scenario, we might have to
revert to the UUCP networks that predominantly carried internet traffic in
the '80s and early '90s. These networks were woven together by simple
telephone lines connecting one computer to another, and to another, and to
another. Each node on the net was independant of the others, and traffic
was routed in all directions. The distributed and redundant nature of
these networks manifested characteristics of the invincible, robust model
from which ARPANET was conceived.
The ability to re-route our messages is not a serious concern today
since, as you point out, Yahoo is happy to carry any content that will
generate advertising revenue. Nevertheless, it seems prudent to keep
those old UUCP cables around, just in case.
Martin R.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 01 2000 - 01:02:55 PST