[governance] Re: Where are we going?

[David Allen]

As has already been ably put here:

>In the physical world, cultural spaces and the corresponding communities are separated by some physical distance
>..
>the Internet is a common space and it does not provide similar boundaries or a continuum for progressively moving from one cultural space to another.

However.  While one challenge is to understand and deal with differences, there are some underlying continuities.  Surely these continuities are the essential context.

Specifically.  Well prior to the Internet, separate cultures have found themselves increasingly brought into confrontation with each other.  Transportation technology, and then communications technology, catalyzed the junction.  Worlds that would otherwise have stayed separate much longer have instead collided.  The results are often not pretty, and certainly there are clashes.

Only last week for example in Indonesia, a person associated with Playboy magazine was finally acquitted in a court case, a case that circled around non-Internet media in conflict with local values.  This is only a recent illustration where non-Internet media facilitate, to bring cultures face to face with no straightforward means to commensurate or to conciliate between them.

While the Internet may be a next step in that acceleration of confrontation, the problem has been with us for a very long time in fact.  Most all our societies show it, certainly in the US where culture clash is almost the order of the day, but in many societies.  The backlash that is common against immigrant populations has some of this as an element; regional conflicts, internal to a national setting, may be some of the most vicious.

Where does this occur?  In the case of the Internet, the most recent venue, the event is not in a place (as we mean that conventionally) - the Internet is rather a place in the mind.  And of course it is just the latest in a very long list of places in the mind - novels, movies, oral histories, chautauqua meetings, vaudeville, itinerant troupes ...  Though some of these examples involve physical places and gatherings, the essential event is a shared experience in the mind.

And while the Internet has further accelerated the confrontation among differing cultural codes of conduct, in this very long history, there are also - at least faint - divides still available on the Internet.  We only go to a page if we click, at least if we maintain popup control.

So our problem is as old as mankind.

What is one particularly potent element in the place in the mind?  Symbols.  These symbols have often been the spur for the most heinous neighbor-killing-a-neighbor, civil wars between intra-national cultures that go on for as long as decades.  Decisions that many take to regard symbols will - perforce - be deemed policy, beyond the technical.

There will be technical questions that distinguish the new Internet medium.  Policy, regarding age-old questions, will also it seems be unavoidable.  As some here are noting.

To quote Bertrand - again - "[This debate] deserves better than just talking past one another."  To quote him further, and more recently, "do [comments here] help everybody understand the issues or somebody's position better ? do they introduce principles that unify or principles that divide ? do they help shape a better system, that will be more just and more efficient for everybody ? "

Parminder has pointed out that this discussion is one, important, proxy in the larger discussion of governance.  Hopefully the discussion can learn the more useful contours.

David
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