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Ding! Your Data is Now Free to Roam About the Internet
Flickr Photo: Cubbie_n_ VegasIf you're anywhere around my age -- I'm 33, I can admit it -- you don't remember how small the world used to be. Before the advent of the jet airliner in the 1950s, intercontinental travel was long, hard, and expensive. Only the very rich went abroad. Getting around the U.S. was no piece of cake either: until the interstate system, traveling by car was long, tedious, and expensive, too.
Infrastructure improvements, coupled with rising incomes and an increased awareness of cultures other than our own, has caused travel to skyrocket world-wide. The National Academy of Engineering figures that, "Over the past five decades, Earth’s inhabitants have increased their travel demand from an average of 1,400 to 5,500 km, using a combination of automobiles, buses, railways, and aircraft." This has fundamentally changed the way we live.
Now, let's think about your data.
Bacon is Power
Flickr Photo: ChotdaAs many of you know, I love bacon. Ask me for my recipe for maple and bacon cake (with maple frosting!) some time. Maybe one reason I love bacon so much is because Bacon is the source of one of my favorite sayings. In 1597, Sir Francis Bacon said:
Knowledge is power.
It's practically a moral code at my house. But I've also been thinking about it in the context of nptech lately.
When the Internet first went mainstream, there was a lot of talk about how it would democratize information: more of us would be able to access more information more easily and we'd all become more powerful. Access to information is the key to Thomas Friedman's argument about how and why the Berlin Wall fell and why China is opening up, for example -- and communications technologies are behind all that.
In the early 2000s, I thought a lot about this. Yes, we did know more. More people were able to share what they knew, and more of us could access it. But it wasn't the dynamic, sweeping, grand experience that a phrase like "democratize information" might suggest. Here's why:
- Lots of information opened up, but lots more is still locked behind walls in old delivery models. You still have to subscribe to many publications. You have to travel to get particular volumes or pay lots of money for experts to tell you what you need to know.
- Access is not pervasive enough. The folks who, arguably, most need free and easy access to information and knowledge have the least access to the chanels that can deliver it. If you are poor in urban America, or if you live in rural areas, you can't afford or simply cannot get Internet access.
In the last year though, we've seen signs that the democratization of information is about to happen in a very real, rapid, Founding Fathers kind of way.