Well the reading and blogging deluge continues . . . an 80-page article about The Wealth of Networks by Benkler as well as a plethora (my $60 word) of posts by the cohort. The fire hose has been turned up a bit. Admittedly, though, there's a lot of good stuff being proffered and read. I'm seeing a different take on the democratization of our world via the Internet. While the jury is still out with me in regards to education, in a broader general sense I see how the general populace has a greater voice and the ability to impact things they couldn't previously.
Take the Sinclair case in which a conservative media outlet was going to air a documentary damning to John Kerry's presidential bid and how the internet spurned an outcry, which eventually led to the airing to be cancelled. And then the story of Diebold Election Systems where an activist found specifications for, and the actual code of, Diebold's machines and vote-tallying system on the internet and posted them online. What followed was a classic Web 2.0 collaboration with scientists and other interested parties that exposed the weaknesses of Diebold's systems and brought the debate of automated voting to the forefront.
I'd say that's definitely giving a voice to the masses . . .
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