Two important aspects are ownership of communications infrastructure and established expectations.
Ownership - does it matter whose wire it is? We are so used for all wires to be owned by third parties that we don't even think about it. Would it change the nature of communication if participants truly "owned" the channel? Expectations - does all tele-communication need be instant? Is this expectation somewhat limiting? For example, wireless/IR-equipped handhelds, PDAs & smartphones could establish point-point connections with nearby participating devices and propagate bits by "hand delivery" to the next hop (routing being geo-based and augmented with movement predictions of the particular device). Your message may traverse dozens of "carriers" until it reaches the destination, perhaps few days later (I've heard that this is how e-mail actually works in some parts of Cambodia - bike messenger carries a wireless laptop that picks and delivers mail from server in each village she passes through, probably using some form of UUCP.) The *need definition* has been co-opted by the commercial domain and there is disconnect between that elusive "original unadulterated" need (if we assume one exists at all) and technological development. This is why all "breakthroughs" are simply more of the same with a different font, and real innovations ocassionally happen outside mainstream - P2P, network computing - all that stuff motivated by access to free movies, music and good porn (and justified as a tool for freedom-fighting and saving China from censorship :-) > So here we are now, with somereally good examples based > upon our historical experience. And I think networkcoding is > the only thing that I’ve heard which is making waves in > terms ofradical change in how data is communicated across > communication networks. > ... > In terms of routing maili traffic,well one could also > create an entirely separate messaging based network > whichexists physically separate from the existing internet. > Perhaps we will be ableto do this when the cost to put > satellites up in the air comes down and we’llbe able to > form our own ephemeral networks which aren’t reliant on > routers, butinstead are reliant on oxygen and hydrogen ions > moving between wearablecomputing. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
