Feeds are Just the First Step
Jeff Jarvis has a good post today about all the feeds, conversations, aggregations, and other kinds of thingies that make up what he calls Web 2.0. He says, “This is a new architecture. It's a dynamic architecture.”
It's even more than that — it's political. These meta-informational thingies are letting us see our online environment in ways we can't possibly see the offline world. What's important isn't just that these thingies are dynamic (although that's clearly important) but also that they can be (1) visualized and (2) affected by the attention of individuals. When humans can see something and act on it, they are suddenly in charge of their own environment. “Well, of course,” you say. “That's not a big deal. People have been able to see commercial web pages for ten years now.”
It is a big deal, because with all of this meta-informational depth (meta-information piled on meta-information, producing information of great quality — a term Ben Reeve invented, and something he understands better than anyone else) we can find issues and people we want to work on/with and then actually do something about it. That's the big difference. All this high-quality meta-information allows us to see the rules and roles that make up groups online, join those institutions for brief periods of time (because we're just the right person for the job) and change the world. Offline, it's hard to see who's in charge or what's really going on. Online, if enough information is available (and, boy, are we producing a lot of information), we can start to see patterns and form into groups on the fly.
What we'll do together in this new Web 2.0 isn't predictable, because we're joining a complex system that is growing more complex all the time. (In a real sense, online organizations are alive.) But it will be more fulfilling for us. The first step, though, is to realize (as Jeff has for a long time now, and many others) that meta-information is enormously valuable.
The next step is to have the tools that allow us to act on it — easily. That means ways to create groups with a click, show rules and roles and boundaries, include deliberation modules, allow adaptation and evolution and bank accounts, etc. We need all of this now. Groups are always more powerful than individuals acting on their own, and with all of this information we're ready to move on.
What Does Netizenship Look Like?
Alexander Svensson has posted this picture of the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) models suggested in its recent paper [doc].
The paper (and thus the picture!) doesn't seem to acknowledge the possibility that online citizens — netizens — might be able to get along just fine without internet-specific involvement by governments. Of course law should apply to the internet. But that doesn't mean we need specific technical mandates or control of internet resources by governments.
What would the netizenship drawing look like?