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News from the Future of Public Media
Netizenship: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
email discuss Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 9, 2008 at 10:19 AM
Are we headed backwards, to a media world that looks more like cable than the Internet? For Jonathan Zittrain, the iPhone is the enemy, Wikipedia is our friend, and our laptops are battle zones in a new war. By the time you’re done reading The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It (Yale University Press), you’ll be looking at that iPhone with suspicion as well. Zittrain argues that the key to the astounding creativity in the high-tech digital environment in the last two decades is the relatively open nature of the PC, combined with the relatively open nature of the Internet.
The fact that users can reprogram the PC—install, even write new software for it, mix, match and create new applications—and can share them on an Internet that hasn’t distinguished much between the packets it sends around has made not just new ideas blossom but let people collaborate on improving and, eventually, commercializing them. But that very openness also created enormous problems when spam and all kinds of malware began to take over the PCs of unsophisticated users and clog the Internet with junk. Now what?
One answer is Apple’s favorite: build a controlled appliance that can only be programmed by the manufacturer. It means dependable quality, but also no new, unpredictable creativity coming back into the system from the user. Another answer is to build trusted Web-based services that make the PC into a dumber, but more reliable, terminal. Users get reliability, but are robbed of the ability to use existing opportunities to make new ones; the service providers control the user’s experience of the service. Yet another answer is to provide far more security at the level of the broadband provider, which can shield users from malware and other bad stuff. But protected users are also disempowered users.
Zittrain’s answers are nuanced and multiple. He encourages experiments, drawing from one of the open Internet’s best successes—Wikipedia, a transparent virtual community with clearly expressed values and ongoing response to problems. He imagines dividing up our computers into secure zones and less secure zones—one for safety, one for experiment. He calls for better monitoring and reporting (on an anonymized basis) of Internet usage on open platforms so that users can better see what is going on (for instance, a jump in traffic when a PC has been invaded by a spammer), share successful solutions to problems and alert others to bad stuff as it comes up (think virtual volunteer fire brigades). He also thinks there’s a place for regulation, and for encouraging more market competition.
Ultimately, Zittrain thinks this is a key issue for our time because it’s about how we participate in our own culture. He wants us all to be able to be Netizens, people with an understanding of good citizenship on the Web. (Apple understandably just wants us to be good consumers; governments usually want obedient subjects.) He wants the future to be one that is built openly, in a participatory way. He wants for Netizens to have tools to be watchdogs on power. And he sees an open Internet as essential for that. Zittrain’s new book is worth reading and talking about. Or, as Jimbo Wales (founder of Wikipedia) puts it, “turn off your laptop until you’ve read this book.”
Discussion
For those who are interested, you can read and comment on the entire book online at http://yupnet.org/zittrain
Hoping for a dynamic conversation and to put into practice some of Zittrain’s key points.