Internet 2.0

I'll start my post with a vision of Internet 2.0 from an humanities (not engineering) perspective that comes from the Digital Ethnography department of Kansas State University. This video points out in less than five minutes a lot of furure implications of a new technology; I will try to focus my lines in the last seconds of the video, when the authors mention this key issues:


Teaching to the machine: we, the users, are supposed to be the new creators of Internet 2.0. A new technology that is also a new business model, that allows us to create and to have the opportunity put a price to our ideas. Is going to be a sustainable or a disruptive technology? At the moment, companies and individuals seem to absorb the incremental improvements of this technology in a good way. However, we must be aware and don't put off the scent selling cheap our valuable ideas. Companies not only keep track of our good ideas and contributions, but also re-adapt theirselves automatically and learn about us, the users and creators. An example is A.L.I.C.E. (http://www.alicebot.org), a virtual robot that learns while people chat with him; this is called artificial intelligence.

Copyright, Autorship and Identity: These are three integrated issues that may have an answer in the next years. Nowadays, the Web offers a lot of spaces where people can hide themselves offering corrupt information without being punished. In addition, there are also a lot of companies and individuals who take profit of other people's work because of the weak regulation over copyright. Internet 2.0 may face to these challenges and try to find a definitive solution.

Ethics: is linked with other issues such as copyright, autorship or identity. All technologies are controversial, since the individual can act through them to reach objectives that would be impossible to reach without technologies. What ethics do is to explain the correct behavior of the individual. With Internet 2.0, individuals are able to act with an incorrect behavior without having regard to some rules (because there's a lack of rules and law at the moment). This can happen of various ways, from acting with a false identity to writing false things about other companies. Also, aesthetics is not controled in Internet 2.0 and may be controlled in some way for the global good. Some harmful and painful images can be in the Web in seconds if there's no law or regulatory system that controls it.

Love and Family: with Internet 2.0 we are now linked to much more people that we actually think. The network involving ourselves can be enormous, but however, our daily live can be harmed. Our family, our values...spending time with people who we like or love may go to less, and the sense of love can change with virtual contact. Examples as Facebook show how is more important to have more people as "friends" in your network, that really knowing some closed friends in deepth.