Rushkoff Reading

I agree with a lot of what Rushkoff has to say. I think he understands the development of the Internet, from open source cooperation to media ownership, and then to user-generated content. Web 2.0, or the concept of user content, began from basements and collaborations amongst friends. Facebook, Digg, YouTube were all just ideas and started with small cooperative user bases. However, as they gained in popularity, we've seen that companies like Google and Microsoft try to get involved to make money.

While this is a natural trend on the internet, there will always be two tiers; the company owned and affiliated websites, and the more open source community websites. While Rushkoff suggests that we should utilize this communicative revolution to open up communication with our political leaders, this is a too idealized view of how the internet works. One of the keys to success of the Internet is anonymity, and as anyone that has spent anytime browsing YouTube comments knows, people abuse anonymity to say the most ridiculous and at time hateful things possible. So while Rushkoff has a good idea of trying to integrate the internet into dialogs with our elected leaders, the execution would be very difficult.

On the other hand, there still exists the ability for the net to be used outside of mainstream political purposes. Rushkoff's examples of the WTO protesters is a good example. Another one is the "Anonymous" attacks on the Church of Scientology. Developing within the last couple of weeks, a group of hackers and "cyberpunks" dubbed Anonymous have been focusing themselves on Scientology by attacking their websites. In this way they are utilizing the anonymity of the internet to fight what they perceive as injustice. Here is an example of their press release:



Personally I am fascinated by this movement. I think Rushkoff would agree with me in the fact that this represents the internet being utilized in a communal interest with cooperation between many people across the world.