This is a great talk from the TED Conference. Yochai Benkler, a thought-leader on networks and collaboration talks about how the Internet is laying the groundwork for the next phase of human organization.
In many ways it seems like we’re coming full circle to a pre-industrial age sensibility by doing things that we like to do as opposed to doing things that we must. Basically we’re contributing to the commons as individuals strictly for the love of the activity and the community and not strictly in pursuit of profit. We’re even beginning to trade goods and services directly without currency as an intermediary.
In 1995 Netscape was on the rise having created the first commercially viable Web browser. For the first time regular people could use the Internet. They didn’t know why they wanted to use it, but they could.
That browser combined with the earlier acquiescence of the technocrats from the National Science Foundation who managed the Internet backbone and the technonerds who were it’s primary users to commercial communications made it possible for the Internet to take the path that it has.
Well if this Web site isn’t about restaurants, what is is it about?
The video below is part of what this blog is about.
I believe that we are in the process of turning the network that we so dearly use to obtain information into the actual computer.
We don’t know where the revolution is going to end, but we can be sure of one thing. It has begun.
Each day we create new content for the machine. Each day we give the machine the intimate details of our lives in order to connect with other people and organize the mundane tasks or our daily routines.
The Internet will help us reorganize our lives both at the macro and the micro level. And we’re going to examine how. Ready?
While trolling the Internet for information about neighborhoods and real estate, my wife stumbled upon this little bit of information.
I don’t know if your children use “my space”, but there is a New Albany page that may give you and your children some insight. The school monitors the pages (I think?), anyway we monitor our daughters page and apparently many teens use these pages to talk to other kids when their families may be moving.
We are moving to California this summer and my daughter and I used “my space” to reach out to the student population at her prospective high school. As with any high school, the children seem to divide people up into groups or cliques, but I don’t know that it’s possible to avoid that anywhere, but thankfully those groups are not “the have’s and the have nots” and are not based on race or or religious affiliation. It tends to be more divided based on interests and extracurricular activities.
I remember when I had to move to a new school. It was a difficult experience. Trying to meet people who wouldn’t beat you up was hard enough, much less finding friends.
Many parents move into a home when their children are school age and don’t think about moving to another school district until their kids graduate from high school or college for fear of destabilizing their children’s social connections.
Could family mobility increase as a result of kids being able to find peer groups through a social networking site before they have to relocate physically?
