6/27/2003 05:49:00 PM

Daniel posted this on the Greenbelt blog. he references some comments by the insightful, and multi-talented, information architect Adam Greenfield. i posted the response below in this comments thread.

Show me a case where e-mail or blogs or smart mobs really and unambiguously did bring down a tyrant. Show me a situation in which even one high-school bully was put in their place with the aid of this technology, let alone the pathetic tinhorn strongmen that still ru(i)n so much of this pretty sphere...


the benefits of technology-induced culture shifts are, very often, crassly overinflated in the short term and profoundly underestimated over the long term. the impact of this thing called the internet cannot be adequately assessed in one decade of use by the common person. just as the impact of the printing press over multiple generations (right up into our time--without which there would be no internet) was not something that could be assessed, charted or celebrated when Henne Gaensfleisch, commonly called Johann Gutenberg, in the 1400s was assiduously setting each letter of the Latin Bible for the first print run of a book in the history of humankind.

Adam Greenfield's June 26th v-2 post, while raising excellent questions, presumes too much in its assessments. we are unable to make any substantial claim to know the impact of the internet, the great-great-great-great grandchild of the moveable type press.

unable to speak definitively about such things from our vantage point we are tasked with choosing to live in ways that satisfy us in light of the questions that our technologies give us opportunity to pose.