Thursday, September 15, 2005

Making a real difference to the future

Susan Crawford believes that "the clueful are completely out of touch."
People don't care about progressive wireless-based platforms. People riding on the subway just want to get home and aren't thinking about the collective conversation. The most transformative of transformations, the electronic excitement of our age, has not touched the hearts and minds of the voting public.

This is bad news for our collective online future. If no one cares about openness, about connectedness, about interaction, it can all be quietly taken away.

We have some choices to make. We could keep going to conferences (boy, are there a lot of conferences). We could keep recognizing the coolest of the cool A-list blogcasters, and we could really get into the people's video. We could moan about how Skype doesn't have open APIs.

Or -- we could start working on true grassroots appreciation of the open internet and all it makes possible. That's what I want to do. I decided a while ago that life was short and that I had to dedicate myself to something that I believed in. I'll be meeting with people in Boston, DC, and SF about OneWebDay in the coming weeks, and we're building a great team...

...we're not making progress on the Hill or at the FCC. It's time to make a big public deal out of access to the open internet.

She's talking about getting ordinary folk energised about the importance of Net neutrality. I wish her luck but fear, that in spite of its crucial importance, this remains a concept way too abstract and far removed from most people's day to day radars, that the task will prove hugely challenging. Now if they had the funds to recruit some of the big PR firms like Burson-Marsteller to the cause, then you never know.

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