Hi Edward, Thanks for reading the post,
I do agree with you that on-line communities offer resources which can help those who wish to discover others who are either thinking or creating in relational or similar contexts. like I said, the Internet is under threat. "Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments -- totalitarian and democratic alike -- are monitoring people's online habits, endangering important human rights." Berners-Lee. The larger sites/platforms like itunes is centralized and walled off. The Murdoch Empire News International have already made invenstments into walling off the Internet, specifically for Sky HD broadcasting. Taking up mass bandwidth. "Giant providers want it privatized to "discriminate in favor of their own search engines (while) slowing down or blocking services by their competitors. (They're) spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress" and the FCC to defeat Net Neutrality and jeopardize the Internet's future." The Struggle for Net Neutrality - http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2009/11/struggle-for-net-neutrality.html Make no mistake: The free-flowing Internet as we know it could very well become history. What does that mean? It means we could be headed toward a pay-per-view Internet where Web sites have fees. It means we may have to pay a network tax to run voice-over-the-Internet phones, use an advanced search engine, or chat via Instant Messenger. The next generation of inventions will be shut out of the top-tier service level. Meanwhile, the network owners will rake in even greater profits. To me, getting rid of libraries and closing off the Internet to independent or smaller communities are part of the same issue. A greedy and intrusive effort by corporations only allowing people access to information as paying consumers, rather than allowing people to have the right find information and knowledge for free and on their own terms. This is a neoliberal takeover... Wishing you well. marc > Marc - > > That's a great post. > > I do think, however, that you can also get a sense of being in a > learning community through online participation - I can remember my own > sense of excitement and encouragement when I first started to join > communities like WebArtery and TrAce online about ten years ago, and > found that there were all sorts of other people out there interested in > the same stuff I was just discovering myself. Furtherfield itself is now > an enormously important resource in this respect. > > We'd better hope that this is the case, anyhow, because the library > system is going to be decimated for sure in the next few years. One > theme which keeps emerging strongly from a whole sequence of recent > posts is the extent to which we are now re-living the experiences of the > 1970s. It's not just the cutbacks, which Labour would have made as well: > it's the extent to which the Tories are using the cutbacks as an excuse > to dismantle the welfare state. What's happening in the NHS at the > moment is really alarming. I keep hoping that an issue is going to come > along which will split the coalition and thereby force a general > election, but maybe it's not going to happen. > > - Edward > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour > _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
