More recent stuff includes thoughts about the nature of intellectual property (parts 1, 2, 3) and the essay on new media, democratization of publishing and its likely profound effects, below. As usual, our buddy Guido will be staying at the house with his twin Rotweilers 'Spike' and 'Killer'...
Comments 12:22:44 PM    

What new media change most, however, is institutions and their influence. James Burke and Robert Ornstein make the point in The Axemaker's Gift that the printing press became a big reason for the decline in influence of the Catholic Church and the rise of nation-states. When people began publishing Bibles in their own language, it gave cohesiveness to societies that had thought of themselves as Catholic first, and German or French secondarily.

As publishing became easier, it was easier for rivals, like Luther and Protestants of all stripes to emerge, and for nation-states to compete to deliver temporal services. The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of Democracy all cut into the Church's power.

Today, it's the nation-states' turn, imho. I don't think most governments are any more concerned with The Internet than the Church initially was with printing. The Church, belatedly seeing the power that publishing conferred, did, during one epoch, attempt to ban printed 'vernacular' Bibles - books printed in any language except the Vatican's 'secret code' of Latin. But, by then, the proverbial cat was out of the ecclesiastic bag.

Authoritarian states are already trying to regulate or censor the Net, to little avail in most cases. The democratization wrought by printing, which brought book publishing costs down by at least an order of magnitude by the 19th century, dramatically contributed to accelerating change in a world that had progressed only slowly for the 2000 previous years.

The new democratization of publishing has seen at least a similar reduction in costs: Web servers and phenomena like Weblogging have reduced the cost of publishing to essentially free. I think its very likely that this will create change as profound as it did the first time. Ideas like Jim Moore's 2nd Superpower are just the beginning. The unquestioning pack journalism so visible among 'legit' media during the recent Iraq excursion, is another - and will increasingly be the reason people turn to the Net for news, and more importantly, informed analysis and opinion. Same process, different century... what's a post-nation world look like?
Comments 12:15:22 PM    

In 1998 I helped put on the 'Digital '98' conference for press photographers. That conference no longer exists (it was a huge enterprise at one time). Photographers learned how to use the new tools to make better pictures, and now it's no big deal, it's just what you do. Good.

Weblogging is going to change journalism much more fundamentally than digital imaging did, imho.
Comments 8:40:12 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures