http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50992.html
Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1404
Excellent. The centralisers and greedy absorbers may be about to experience a bit of a downturn. This has already happened in several countries and seems to be heading towards North America too. For all of its brilliance (giving credit where credit is due, Facebook is in many ways state-of-the-art in its design of self-organising social spaces) the centralised model it insists upon is not. Shunning interconnectedness, networkability and open standards except where it lets them suck you further to the centre is either a) doomed to eventual failure or b) going to take over the world. I really don’t see the latter happening. Centralised models are simply not resilient or flexible enough in the long term, no matter how well built a system might be to negate some of the more pernicious effects.
I like the Yeats quote in this article but hope that the lines that follow in the poem don’t come to pass:
‘mere anarchy is loosed up on the world’. What we actually need is a federated model using well-defined standards and protocols that do not lock us into one provider, which put real control into the hands of end-users, and which allow a highly variegated and interconnected ecosystem to evolve.
Created:Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:43:35 GMT
