Equality of Access

It's not that long ago that to learn about something meant getting in the car or hopping on a bus to go spend the better part of your day in a library. If you were lucky, your family might have “invested” a thousand or more dollars in an encyclopaedia. If you wanted to research a product purchase it meant collecting brochures, buying magazines and getting on the phone to ask people about it. The Internet changed all that.

But on the publishing side, things haven't changed so much - the voice that shouts the loudest is still the one that gets heard.

Television, newspapers and radio are traditionally the megaphones powerful people and corporations use to control what we hear. Recently web sites, blogs, forums, social networks have made it possible for many more people to be heard - but increasingly, the old-media dynamics are taking over. Your message now won't be heard unless you pay for advertising or “search engine optimisation” or unless a powerful blogger picks it up.

If you have a message, whether it's a social cause, an opinion, a new service, a job offer, an observation - there are people who want to hear it. In a “free” medium there should be no corporation-controlled "toll booth" that your listener, or you, need to go through just so you can communicate.

That's what we mean by equality of access. The Internet should be for everyone – not just for those with the money or skills to “work” it.

There's no simple answer to this problem. Commerce is important – today's Internet wouldn't be where it is without it. Some barriers, even toll booths, are appropriate - e-mail spam is an example of what you get if there are no barriers whatsoever. But we need to look at each and ask “Is this an artificial barrier?” and “Is this fair?”

Where we can, we need to support initiatives that make it easier for you and me to be heard. The wik.me initiative, for example, seeks to democratise the creation and discovery of knowledge. It does this by extending the community-focussed principles of sites like Wikipedia to the broader areas of Public Data Management and Search.

Comment by drllau on November 8, 2010 at 12:38am: You are competing (whether you know it or not) in the attention economy. The reasons why google places and other top XYZ sites work is that people want social proof in areas outside their expertise/experience so tend to follow the crowd. As for distinguishing between say real-grassroots causes as compared with astrotrufing campaigns ... well that is why people crave authenticity.

Stephen Young wrote
>The Internet should be for everyone – not just for those with the money or skills to “work” it.

read http://yupnet.org/zittrain/ - Future of Internet

I see this moving in a couple of directions ... firstly ia the notion of scoring ... whether kudos, reputation points or whatever social metric, they are awarded on recognition of activity (eg so many points for commenting, modding etc) This hopefully ctreates a feedback cycle ... in contrast to say L$ which is a credit token as multiplier of typically USD and can be sold/exchanged but only spent within their park.

On the other hand, measuring influence is trickier ... Linus doesn't have more money than Bill Gates but his decision can impact millions. If you look at Australian voting system, we have a rough system, call preference voting ... if you're not that clued up on a policy debate then we give our preference to someone else who we believe has superior knowledge/insight. Then more thoughtful messages bubble up to the top (in terms of attention).

Third point is that the internet has enabled new forms of self-organisation. People are still grasping at market mechanisms (which is essentially price signalling) for many activitires that are not profit oriented. See www.socialgoals.com for examples. The problem is that power goes to those that design the systems, from setting up incentives to enforcing rules of conduct. Not much thought has gone into the intersection of IP law, competition law and policy formation.

Equality of Access

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