Feb
3
Reading Response 3
February 3, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
My survey on the future of the Internet
Article: The Rise of Participation Culture
The plethora of ways to share different types of information today is amazing. It seems there are more and more sites popping up where you can share music, videos, thougts, constantly. Even more, all these sites can be interconnected, even if they are created and/or run by competing corporations. To think that only 10 years ago we though communication by email was amazingly fast…could we someday refer to email as snailmail? The ability to use different devices to share all sorts of things has really opened up this whole social networking thing. Many kids don’t have full-time access to a computer, but what teen doesn’t have their cell phone? The cell phones today are more powerful than the computers I played Oregon Trail on back when I was in elementary school. As all these tools become more interactive and available I can see how we might start to break down some of the barriers keeping certain populations out of the loop, which becomes increasingly important as this becomes part of our culture.
In reading the section on what comes next I was surprised how focused it was on the same concerns we had 7-10 years ago. Certainly we will always need to balance privacy and security needs and the bigger the target the greater the security concern. However, it seemed to say little about what will happen next. In order to help answer some of the questions I have, I’ve created a survey. Please take the survey (it’s only 10 questions) to give me some input. It was created using polldaddy.
As for myself, one idea raises my curiosity. As great as many of the web 2.0 tools are, many are just that. Simply tools. Certainly the hammer was a great invention, but it was what people did with it that made it great. So the idea is this…I think we are just starting to scratch the surface of what can be done on-line and I’m wondering what we’ll be able to build with these emerging technologies.
