Day 8

Todays lecture again got a little bit side tracked and a bit intense with the thought of democracy of the internet.

The thought of democracy in a democratic country is something that will always get people talking, because at the end of the day that's what democracy is. Its freedom of speech and the ability to be able to vote for who your leaders are and more importantly not to vote for anyone that is going to take away your liberty. But what if this democracy is taken away? What if the internet becomes governed and you are suddenly told what you can and cannot look at and research on the net.


At the beginning of the lecture notes there were some simple words to think about in regards to the internet and democracy, I thought this may help summarize our lecture.

Access, when it comes to information who has access to it, and at the end of the day this is a matter of education. Many people can simply not afford a computer and the internet, so these people have to rely on books, newspapers and television. So are they not getting the same information as the rest of us. I hope they are and just because the internet seems an easier way of finding the information, I hope that doesn't mean there's a difference in the relativity of the news.

Encryption, do we have the power to encrypt the information we are sending and receiving on the web, are we sending any information that needs to be encrypted. Most of the traffic on the web is not encrypted so it is easy for encrypted things to stand out and be checked, and this is a good thing if the encrypted information has something to do with terrorism, or child pornography. This stuff should be found deleted and the people involved should be looked up. So if everyone is encrypting everything they send it would make it harder for these criminals to be found and caught.

Commodification, is information a commodity more than just a service. This idea that information can be bought and sold, more importantly can information on the internet be bought and sold. Will we one day have to pay for everything we download by the page.

Intellectual property, is the legal rights of the people that create content. It covers copyright, patent, trademark, industrial design right and trade secret. On the internet this can be difficult to police. However, as we have seen on many occasions the music industry 'not liking' people downloading music. This is why we have spoken so much in the course about Creative Commons, this idea you can add content to the net, and people can add to it and make changes yet still giving you the credit for the original process. Is intellectual property still relevant when it comes to the internet.

The public sphere, is in the old sense when you had the right and ability to group together in public and talk about issues relevant to the time, i.e, sitting in a coffee shop chatting about the upcoming election. In the modern sense this is the ability to still talk about it in public but also take that public forum to the web, you can go to forum chat rooms and right up your beliefs on a web blog and have other people read it and make comment on it.

Decentralisation, is taking the source of information away from one major source and making global, there is no one source of the internet there are millions of different networks and if your shut down one network the whole system will not collapse. This sense of it truly being global in the sense that there are no boarder boundaries for the web a person in Australia can quite easily exchange information with someone in Iceland at the click of a button. You can quite easily get news from any source around the world and not rely on what your news provider wishes to tell you what happened, you can take it onto yourself to go out and find news yourself.

Anarchy, in its form that there is no one governing body of the internet. It is a complete opposite of democracy as is it not governed. This idea of no governance, no rules, no laws. It obviously doesn't exist we can see that in copyright laws being exercised on the web. there is a sense of anarchy with people tyring to stand up to the 'man' so to speak with using the ideas of the eff, creative commons, and open source software. ........

So talking about all these things, we contemplated the idea that the internet was the equalising agent and boarders are non existent. If that is true then the internet is anarchy, and is open to the down falls of anarchy. The idea of uncontrollable data though is quite scary, I don't like the idea of terrorists having open range to material that is a danger to society, as much as I don't like anything that happens on the net that will inhibit my life in the real world.

At the end of the lecture we watched a video of Cory Doctorow, speaking at the authors@google convention. Although he is an ex employee of EFF, and was talking about topics that the EFF are. The idea that we should not be told what we are allowed to do with the software we have on our computers, and also what we can do with the cd's and dvd's we have purchased. We should be allowed to be as creative with it as we like. You can check it out at: