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Communication in the 21st Century

Posted by Paul Miller at 4:38pm on Tuesday, 4th November 2003

A couple of weeks ago, Will Davies of iSociety at the Work Foundation and I did a double act at the RSA. Our title was 'Communication in the 21st Century' and I have to admit it was quite good fun. If you're interested, here's Will's lecture (pdf 150k) and here's my response (pdf 70k). There were also some pretty interesting questions from the floor but I'm afraid I don't have a write up of those... I think the RSA might be doing a transcript at some point. The purpose of putting the talks up here is that we'd be interested in your comments too.

Comments

1
Great piece - I found it fascinating. Thanks for putting this up here. As we shift from the broadcasting communicative paradigm, these horizontal ways (weblog, instant messaging etc) of communicating and creating community seem to be increasingly important. But the means of becoming part of that community is dependent on crossing the "digital divide" and having access to the necessary hardware to participate (often far too expensive for most people in the world). Given that huge corporations (the size of which we have never seen before) such as AOL Time Warner increasingly own the copyright, the content and means of access to such networks, is there a danger that corporate self-interest will win out over public good? While the means of communication may be becoming more horizontal and community based, there is no sign that the underlying structures of ownership and power are changing at all.
Posted by David Lee  at 12:58pm on Wednesday, 5th November 2003
2
Would agree with the previous comment - both pieces are interesting in different ways. Two thoughts: the ownership of content is not perhaps as important in all this as usually assumed. Even senior AOL people are coming round to recognising the importance of cit materials. (Commentators like Jarvis have been on about this for ages and it's picked up in a recent Greenhouse post.) And second, Intel's move into what it terms mobilized software could have profound implications for how people use new media spaces in the not too distant future.(See today's Register http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/33861.html.)
Posted by Conor Galvin  at 4:21pm on Friday, 7th November 2003

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