While Vladimir may be free to say what he says in his own country, it is by no means certain that he, and I, might not commit a crime by publishing him in a country like, say, Australia, if what he said was deemed to be contrary to our national security interests.
Which brings me to another consideration. OLO was first and foremost an eDemocracy initiative. In the first years I felt considerable urgency to launch a whole suite of projects, because if we didn’t someone else was certain to see the possibility and do so. A decade later the potential of the Internet for democracy is still unrealized.
I’m not sure that it will ever be realized. Or that if it is, it won’t be mostly in a business as usual way. I referred to GetUp earlier on as showing how the long tail can be leveraged. But GetUp is really just an alternative type of political party. It doesn’t give members a real say in policy, and it stands for only a small, if significant, minority.
Advertisement
The potential that we saw in the Internet was to make it easier for voters to talk to each other and to those who form, influence and administer policy, as well as to politicians. We thought that it would provide a venue where the whole resources of the community could be brought to bear on common problems when and as they arose. We thought it could add to social capital by increasing civility and understanding.
It hasn’t done that over the last ten years, and my fear is that in the next ten it will actually tend to raise global "nervous anxiety" by increasing the speed of dissemination of ideas and undermining the institutions, like newspapers, that used to provide checks on what found its way into the public domain.
Modern societies run on trust, and the risk, and the likelihood, is that the Internet will make for a less trustworthy environment. Political organisations acting like GetUp will make sure that is so.
One thing that struck me about the contrast between 1999 and now is how little has really changed. With the notable exception of climate change, most of the sorts of concerns we had then are still with us.
So my last prediction is this. In the next ten years we may do business differently, but it will still be the same business. On Line Opinion was a Web 2.0 project conceived before the term had been invented. In 2019 we may well be onto Web 4.0, but it is very likely that it will be much the same thing, and I predict that we will still be there to see it unfold.
Discuss in our Forums
See what other readers are saying about this article!
Click here to read & post comments.
19 posts so far.