May 30, 2007

Online vs Non-Existent

Wayne Hodgins in his post Dangerous Assumptions, refers to Erik Duval's comment
"All our material is available on-line. If it isn’t, it kind of doesn’t exist."
While Wayne's post warns that
"Less than 10% of the world’s population has access to the web."
I have to agree that this attitude of it having to be online is becoming integrated into everyday thinking. In some ways it has been there for a while, but it is really starting to set in.

This idea seems to have some distant connection with David
Weinberger's thoughts on the web as well. David gave a 30 minute talk to theMassachusetts Technology Leadership Council's Social Media Cluster titled "Taking Back the Internet: How Social Media will Transform Media and Institutions".

During the presentation David talked about the leading expert in a domain that would not get involved in an online exchange of ideas like Wikipedia and the impact that this will play in information dissemination. If experts are reluctant to engage in the conversation, what impact does that have on the conversation?

The concept has a lot of interesting angles and outcomes. I don't think it is an all or nothing proposition. Be sure to listen to David's presentation if you have time. It is quite long, but I had a long drive last week.

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