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[serialnoob]

http://www.youtube.com/v/ykJcnweXmBI

I have been meaning to ask this for years, and by far, the best place to do it remains here (I don't know any one serious in the "red bricks", mind you!)
Yochai Benkler seems to have made up his mind re. the above title and what is to come next, with which I tend to agree...
Would you care to share your "prospective" views on the net?

[perkiset]

I don't think I heard anything new in that at all, but more a finance-geek friendly version of what the Internet actually means. Bear in mind the audience of that video...

So I guess I'm not sure exactly what you are asking SN. Please flesh out your question and come back at us.

[serialnoob]

Well, in a sense it is related to your more recent post on the music cloud runour.

My question relates to the latest part of the interview where it is suggested that mobile devices, by their very nature, provide the best means of control over the user's life by the big players, hence, their govs, legislators, etc, who will presumably be more and more desperate to regain fame (ok , it's EU, worst G8 in France!).

Paradoxaly, a desktop sits in your privacy, yet, it is less likely to figure out what coffee you drink, right?

I will not expand on why would anybody really want to know what coffee you use, or if at all, but to a marketer (or a politician or an insurer) knowing where you drink it, how often etc. is far more informative.

Logically, govs and all, still excluded from your home in most countries should favor mobile operators in their attempt to "regulate" the web...

[perkiset]

I think it makes a huge amount of sense that the government would like to put a tracking device and remotely-activated bug in everyone's pocket. And smart phones, pads etc are all essentially that. And yes, with NFC iWallet stuff they have even more availability to where you are, what you do, drink, eat, go etc. Rather frightening.

Combine that with this article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20068404-1/apple-patent-suggests-infrared-sensors-for-iphone/

... and you've got something even worse. In the patent they describe a way for "copywritten material" ie., a concert, can be flush with an infrared signal that an iPhone (assumably) sees and then knows to shut down the camera. (Side note, I've already today looked into patenting a filament lens that would float over the iPhone camera that would filter out IR, essentially removing the copy protection.) OK, concerts are bad enough. But when President Asshole of Werefuckedistan decides to bathe an area in IR continually while he massacres his people you've got a real world example of what I'd consider to be pretty negative control.

The challenge is the Faustian bargain that all of these devices represent. Google Mail: You get it free, but we get to parse it and decide what we'll market to you. Apple's new music locker (I assume): We will mirror all your music so you don't have to upload it. But oh BTW the music industry now knows every piece of music you have, ill gotten or not. Facebook will connect you to everyone you want to know. At your expense of them using everything they now know about you as a method for extracting money from you.

I don't know if the notion of "get off the grid" is even valid anymore, I think Pandora's box is wide open. So I wonder if we need to simply change our privacy paradigm and get over it. I really dunno.

[kurdt]

I don't think I heard anything new in that at all, but more a finance-geek friendly version of what the Internet actually means.

Exactly. What the professor says is completely previous gen "meaning of internet". I find it always amusing when extremely smart people rack their brains about "meaning" of something when there is no such thing as meaning. They mask their fabrication of what the future holds as "meaning" of something. Internet does not have a meaning or some sort of "what it will become" any more than we can say what is the meaning of evolution in human organs. Internet is nothing more than stack of technology that delivers electronic pulses from A to B. Then we get the "what it means to society that we can communicate instantly to large amount of people" question. Short answer, it doesn't. For some reason people are so hypnotized about this whole "reach many people at once" paradigm this new technology makes possible. It's funny that we have had similar "technology" for quite long time, it's called shouting. It's nothing more than that. Now our "life management" challenge has evolved to the problem of getting rid off these people who have nothing important to say. I think the old model where only the truly innovative stuff got passed around in the form of books and mouth to ear was better. It wasn't as efficient channel to distribute the knowledge but it handled the whole ranking mechanic much better.

The next and only challenge we should be taking on as species is how to get people to actually learn new stuff. Internet, wikipedia, google and other websites really don't help at all here. Yes, we have the information but now that the adventure of finding new knowledge in the form of maybe trip to library, the journey of reading thru a book has gone away, there's very little motivational for people to actually think. If you watch society closely, you'll find that most people are so called "quiz people". They will find out the answer to almost any question but they don't gather real understanding of the problem and the answer. And no, this doesn't make web evil thing that makes people dumb and deteriorates learning, that's just fear mongering from people who are afraid to lose their status of so called academics.

There you have it, many lines of incoherent rambling with the twist of vague nothingness.