Nick Carr on 8/31/07, writing about the effort to change how the Internet domain system’s “WHOIS” records work:
What makes the WHOIS deadlock interesting is that it reveals, in microcosm, the great and ever widening divide that lies at the net’s heart — the divide between the network as a platform for commerce and the network as a forum for personal communication. The way that tension is resolved — or not resolved — will go a long way toward determining the ultimate identity and role of the internet.
Carr’s succinct (and I think accurate) anatomy of the couer d’Net caught my eye and echoed something just beyond my memory’s grasp. Then I realized, right, this is very much the same dichotomy that I wrote about a long time ago in one of the annual “state of the Web” pieces (from October 1996) that I used to write for Salon:
Two very different groups are emerging with different ideas of how to drive the Web forward: call them the information peddlers and the community builders. The former see the Web as a conduit to distribute information and sell products on a few-to-many pattern; the latter see it as a place to exchange information, many-to-many — to yak.
Not only does this tension between what Carr calls “a platform for commerce” vs. “a forum for personal communication,” or what I called “the information peddlers” vs. “the community builders,” remain prevalent; it is a fissure cutting right through the center of what we’ve come to call Web 2.0.
Here’s a link to the full piece, headlined “After the Gold Rush.” Yes, we were saying that the Web gold rush was behind us. In 1996.
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