The mainstream press is now interested in a committee report that suggests the ABA's Committee on New Information & Technologies is ignorant about the most important new technology: namely, wireless computing (see my previous post for more background).
Professor Ed Felten, a Princeton professor who knows a lot about technology, called the report "high-order cluelessness."
I'm sure the Committee never expected anyone to actuallyreadtheir report. Ooops!
"His talk was loosely focused on the role of law in the new economy. In his words, the product of the new economy is intellectual property. The cardinal characteristic of intellectual property is that the making of copies is extremely cheap."
Marshall McLuhan coined the term "Global Village" and since then the term has come to refer to the fact that technological advances are, in essence, making the world smaller, at least in the sense of people communicating with one another. Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs concept is a corollary to this idea (I highly recommend his book).
I thought about these two gentlemen's ideas again, as I increasingly do, when I read Dan Gillmor's brief account of how "text messenging" or "SMS" (i.e. "short message system") was the means by which the serious respiratory illness known as SARS was first made known. Here's the key point: it wasn't the TV stations or other mainstream media sources that broke the news. There's a social revolution, for you. Most people are too busy with the War in Iraq to notice this revolution, but isn't it the way of the most dramatic revolutions that they are scarcely noticed when they begin to have the most sway?
