From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Wed Jul 17 2002 - 00:33:00 MDT
Michael M. Butler wrote:
>
> SMART MOBS
>
> Howard Rheingold
>
>
The article raises some good points but I am surprised by what
seems to be a lean toward fearing the new technology. The
article even goes so far as to claim bin Laden is a
"superempoered individual" due to the use of modems, wireless
and so on. The article does bring out the excellent point that
content vendors and classic communications media will try to
keep the people as passive consumers only instead of letting
them become active producers and consumers, peer nodes in the
Net. Obviously the full empowering of human beings is what
Extropianism is all about. Clearly it cannot be in our interest
to greatly limit access to computational and communication
capabilities. Rheingold seems to lean toward societal
regulation and establishment of norms in this area. I think
this is backwards. Technology empowers new forms of
organization and interaction that will lead to new social
realities that will come to their own workable norms much more
organically.
- samantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:15:30 MST