I've fallen a little behind on watching TED talks recently, but I took a look at this one today while I waited for Mad Men to come on, and thought it was particularly interesting:
Just a few days ago, I read this article in Wired about Anonymous's campaign against Scientology, which sprang from the culture of trolldom and general mean-spirited mischief-making of the notorious 4chan message boards.
The contrast, and the similarity, between the two discussions is striking to me. Zittrain's argument is that essentially the Internet can be a civil, friendly, just, and self-policing entity, a utopian space for sharing information. The Wired article paints the web as a playground for crazies who like wreaking havoc and making people angry. But what both of them are really about is the personal connections and teamwork that it enables between complete strangers. But, whether for good or evil, it seems to me that the web is very quickly becoming an intensely personal tool rather than an anonymous one.
Certainly a multitude of articles about the emergence of social networking have touched on that. But what interests me most is the fact that extraordinary things like Anonymous rarely spring from systems like Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn; they come from old-fashioned forums and chat rooms that are all about enthusiasts uniting around a common interest, be they Wikipedia enforcers or /b/ trolls.
As much as people are shifting their real-world relationships into the internet, purely internet-based relationships are still being created every day. As someone who has a handful of internet-only friends, I think that's a beautiful and encouraging thing.
The contrast, and the similarity, between the two discussions is striking to me. Zittrain's argument is that essentially the Internet can be a civil, friendly, just, and self-policing entity, a utopian space for sharing information. The Wired article paints the web as a playground for crazies who like wreaking havoc and making people angry. But what both of them are really about is the personal connections and teamwork that it enables between complete strangers. But, whether for good or evil, it seems to me that the web is very quickly becoming an intensely personal tool rather than an anonymous one.
Certainly a multitude of articles about the emergence of social networking have touched on that. But what interests me most is the fact that extraordinary things like Anonymous rarely spring from systems like Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn; they come from old-fashioned forums and chat rooms that are all about enthusiasts uniting around a common interest, be they Wikipedia enforcers or /b/ trolls.
As much as people are shifting their real-world relationships into the internet, purely internet-based relationships are still being created every day. As someone who has a handful of internet-only friends, I think that's a beautiful and encouraging thing.
