*These Pew Foundation surveys are always pretty good.
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Impact-of-the-Internet-on-Institutions-in-the-Future.aspx
Here are some of the respondents: Clay Shirky, Esther Dyson, Doc Searls, Nicholas Carr, Susan
Crawford, David Clark, Jamais Cascio, Peter Norvig, Craig Newmark, Hal Varian,
Howard Rheingold, Andreas Kluth, Jeff Jarvis, Andy Oram, Kevin Werbach, David Sifry,
Dan Gillmor, Marc Rotenberg, Stowe Boyd, John Pike, Andrew Nachison, Anthony Townsend,
Ethan Zuckerman, Tom Wolzien, Stephen Downes, Rebecca MacKinnon, Jim Warren, Sandra Brahman, Barry Wellman,
Seth
Finkelstein, Jerry Berman, Tiffany Shlain, and Stewart Baker.
(((A few highlights:)))
“Having been a senior executive at some of America's largest corporations I am
convinced that model is ultimately doomed. An entity that lasts forever and grows
forever is just not possible and is silly anyway. It is a waste of resources. Society
deserves a better model for the organization and deployment of resources to provide
products and services.
"Scale is still important. Companies like Cisco have shown how to
continue to innovate by acquisition, but the big question is how do corporations
gracefully end? How can we break the cycle of Wall Street, a strong financial services
industry is simply not good for society. Wall Street does not improve productivity, the
model is parasitic, transferring huge resources out of the system. I am looking forward
to the next phase of the industrial revolution.” – Glen Edens, former senior vice
president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett
Packard
“Institutions are in dire crisis. Most institutions (schools and universities, political
parties and governments, enterprises, clubs, and associations) were created to lower
the costs of gathering information, engaging with our peers and taking decisions or
performing some tasks. When these costs drop because of digital technologies, many
institutions have to re‐think where are they adding value and where not, having to be
able to get rid of the value‐less activities they perform and concentrate in the ones that
still make sense.
"But two major risks may arise from this situation. The first one is that
to circumvent institutions, or to differently relate with them and the rest of the
community, a new set of skills and, overall, time, will be highly required. Though new
skills might be more or less easy to acquire (though they will certainly be a driver of
exclusion), time will still be scarce and a major barrier for higher levels of participation
and engagement.
"The second, and related with the former, is that time‐wealthy
individuals (or the ones that can ‘buy’ time by ‘externalizing’ other time‐consuming
activities) will take advantage of their power to dialogue face‐to‐face with the (new)
institutions. The danger, of course, will appear when these individuals are not
representative of the majority of the citizenry and/or only representative of small elites
and plutocracies.
"Thus, lack of engagement by many and intense engagement by a few
can lead up to the replacement of old institutions by new networks which will act as the
previous institutions (i.e. concentrating power) but much less transparent and
accountable because of their centralization.” – Ismael Peña‐Lopez, lecturer at the Open
University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science
