Essays in the Category "Internet and Society"
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News Media Strategies for Survival for Journalists
Those of us living through the Internet-caused revolution in journalism can’t see what’s going to come out the other side: how readers will interact with journalism, what the sources of journalism will be, how journalists will make money. All we do know is that mass-market journalism is hurting, badly, and may not survive. And that we have no idea how to thrive in this new world of digital media.
I have five pieces of advice to those trying to survive and wanting to thrive: based both on experiences as a successful Internet pundit and blogger, and my observations of others, successful and unsuccessful. I’ll talk about writing, but everything I say applies to audio and video as well…
Social Networking Risks
This essay appeared as the first half of a point-counterpoint with Marcus Ranum.
Are employees blogging corporate secrets? It’s not an unreasonable fear, actually. People have always talked about work to their friends. It’s human nature for people to talk about what’s going on in their lives, and work is a lot of most people’s lives. Historically, organizations generally didn’t care very much. The conversations were intimate and ephemeral, so the risk was small. Unless you worked for the military with actual national secrets, no one worried about it very much…
Here Comes Here Comes Everybody
Book Review of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don’t people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market’s transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people…
When the Internet Is My Hard Drive, Should I Trust Third Parties?
Wine Therapy is a web bulletin board for serious wine geeks. It’s been active since 2000, and its database of back posts and comments is a wealth of information: tasting notes, restaurant recommendations, stories and so on. Late last year someone hacked the board software, got administrative privileges and deleted the database. There was no backup.
Of course the board’s owner should have been making backups all along, but he has been very sick for the past year and wasn’t able to. And the Internet Archive has been only somewhat helpful.
More and more, information we rely on—either created by us or by others—is out of our control. It’s out there on the internet, on someone else’s website and being cared for by someone else. We use those websites, sometimes daily, and don’t even think about their reliability…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.