I'm at the Beyond Broadcast conference here at Harvard where James Boyle of Duke Law school just gave a brilliant opening keynote. See Ethan's thorough summary of the talk here. (You can follow the conference on the live webcast here.)
Boyle pointed out that the Internet - and its freeness - actually happened by accident. "Its not that history is sweeping us to greater openness inexorably," he points out. It's that a bunch of geeks were accidentally allowed to make this happen.
If a bunch of government officials, lawyers and companies had been able to sit down and design the internet, rather than the network where control is at the ends and anybody can create virtually anything, it would have been constructed in a much more top-down, centrally controlled way. Corporate and government forces worldwide are trying very hard now to take it in that direction. We cannot assume that freedom will win because the net is intrinsically free. It's not. And it will cease to be free unless people fight to keep it that way.
Boyle points out that we as humans have a horrible track record at predicting the future. With this in mind we need to operate under the following assumptions if we want to create system that maximize social benefit and individual freedom:
1. Make sure you leave as open as possible for as long as possible the construction and design of the system you're making;
2. Make sure you're open to as many kinds of feedback as possible for as long as possible in order to collect and incorporate ideas, and adjust to problems that never would have occurred to you independently;
3. Push against your own instincts about what kinds of control are needed.
Sounds like good advice for any media organization.
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