Participant/doc-searls

From Mozilla Internet as a Public Good Event
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I'm a research fellow with the Berkman Center, a visiting scholar with the Center for Information Technology & Society (CITS) at UCSB, a Senior Editor with Linux Journal, and a co-author with David Weinberger (also of the Berkman Center) of The Cluetrain Manifesto and World of Ends.

Both Cluetrain and World of Ends were audacious and arrogant works, meant to provoke as much as to inform. Both also proceded from a position: That the Net is a public good.

In Cluetrain we called it a place. But what matters as much as that metaphor is where it comes from. Here's Chris Locke in the first chapter of Cluetrain, Internet Apocalypso:

The Net grew like a weed between the cracks in the monolithic steel-and-glass empire of traditional commerce. It was technically obscure, impenetrable, populated by geeks and wizards, loners, misfits. When I started using the Internet, nobody gave a damn about it outside of a few big universities and the military-industrial complex they served. In fact, if you were outside that favored circle, you couldn't even log on. The idea that the Internet would someday constitute the world's largest marketplace would have been laughable if anyone was entertaining such delusions back then. I began entertaining them publicly in 1992 and the laughter was long and loud.

The Net grew and prospered largely because it was ignored. It worked by different rules than the rules of business. Market penetration wasn't interesting because there was no market — unless it was a market for new ideas. The Net was built by people who said things like: What if we try this? Nope. What if we try that? Nope. What if we try this other thing? Well, hot damn! Look at that!...

The Internet became a place where people could talk to other people without constraint. Without filters or censorship or official sanction — and perhaps most significantly, without advertising.

The Net became a commercial place in 1995, four years before we published Cluetrain. It also became a place where free speech, free enterprise, and countless other forms of activity were enabled to a range and degree that defies comparison. There has never been anything quite like it before.

The place-ness of the Net is also apparent in our profligate borrowing of real estate and construction language when we descibe it. We have domains, with locations and addresses that we design, architect and build where we hope to enjoy visitors and traffic. Place-ness is also apparent in prepositions. We say we go on the Net, not through it.

But is the Internet only a place?

No, that's just one metaphor. Among many.

In World of Ends we said the Net was fundamentally an agreement: a protocol, or a set of them. We also said it was what in the free software and open source communities we call NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, and Anybody can improve it.

Then there is the transport metaphor. Senator Ted Stevens was widely mocked when he described the Internet as ...not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Yet, as Ed Felten later remarked, "...experts talk about “pipes” all the time. Is the gap between 'tubes' and 'pipes' really so large?"

Not when we speak about content that we load into a medium for delivery to an end user or a consumer.

And how about when we talk about users as an an audience that we hope to give an experience? Are we not then saying the Internet is a form of theater?

We conflate, confuse and otherwise mix metaphors all the time, such as when we talk about "delivering" an "experience."

Metaphors matter. They not only frame what we know, but also the laws and regulations we form around what we know.

Framing the Net as a piping system for content delivery can result in a largely different set of laws than we'll get when we frame the Net as a place that supports markets where people and organizations gather to do business and make culture.

Witness broadcasting, where free speech does not include seven forbidden words, for which the FCC in the U.S. can fine offenders millions of dollars. In the FCC's language, it's up in the air whether the Net is an "information service" or a "communications service." But what if it's both, and yet neither?

We may never agree about what the Internet is. But we will make laws and regulations that say we do. I'm hoping what we do at IPG will help with that.