For at least 10 or 15 years, educators went gaga over ”the computer.” Sleek, modern, progressive, competitive, it represented everything they imagined the future to be and thus it came to stand for all those things, generally without achieving them. The computer embodied all the values of sophistication. Merely to have it, was to have them: like a lion’s claw necklace that conveys the courage of the beast to the wearer. Eventually, familiarity began to undermine the fetishism. When your students’ cell phones have vastly more processing power than the Apollo 11 computer, and are mainly used for texting, it is hard to retain your reverence.
Because politicians like to seem modern, they try to update the metaphor. The US stimulus package contains 7bn dollars of subsidies for broadband connections. We see the economic advantages of a network -- the lowering of barriers to entry, dramatic improvements in information flow, lower transaction costs -- and we associate those advantages with the thing along which the network’s bits flow. But here’s the problem. The information superhighways of the mind are not just wires.
What we ought to be doing is trying to understand where the architecture of information in our society has been a success, where government investment has yielded remarkable social and economic benefit.
Now would be an ideal time to invest in the architecture of openness.
