eMail and cycles
Ray wonders about how terrible email is, and then Clay Shirky responds with a rather dour and pessimistic view about the end of email. As if had already gone through the end of its useful life.
Let's kill the telephone, while we are at that. Or the TV.
William Abraham quotes Clay, eminent professor of the blogosphere and all things net, and casts a hopeful glance, based on technology and potential niches open there.
I said, in comments to William's post, that :
The other thing is that the blog means an investment, either money or time. You can rant all you want, but to engage readers and similar readers requires knowledge and a compelling narrative technique of sorts.
The same with email: there are tools to restrict the provenance of our email.
Usenet was interesting because it was a completely unregulated, open space, where it didn't matter volume or spam. Other channels are not as forgiving, and as you say technology is already limiting the demise of email.
Think open collaborative spaces.
But on the dynamics of email and Usenet, one fact comes to mind: these are both excellent examples of agents running unchecked, using up all their resources (bandwidth and disk space) because there are no factors to keep them in check. As soon as some kind of competition or "predators" appear, we will surely have a nicely unbalanced but fair dynamical system much a la Volterra-Lotka.
So, there is hope.
I leave the much more complicated analysis of said system to George or Stark. Bye.
Comments
"As soon as some kind of competition or "predators" appear, we will surely have a nicely unbalanced but fair dynamical system much a la Volterra-Lotka. So, there is hope."
You are exactly right to stress that the ultimate dynamism of the system. If spam is the response to the original openness of the system, what will the counter repsonse be? And is it appropriate to fixate on email as an arena unto itself? Isn't possible that alternate technologies might arise on the same infrastructure, but with better guards against untrusted agents? What if IP v6 became widespread, or authentication of IP addresses became automatic? What if the underlying technology of Internet evolved in ways that made spoofing impossible? What if systems evolved like Friendster but required absolutely no effort on the users part? Auto IP address tracking would make sense in a world of fixed IP addresses. At least mild trust for any IP address you interact with could be assumed, and the tracking could be done either by client software on the users machine or by an agent on the network. A vast network of IP addresses that communicate with each other would soon emerge. This would be like Friendster, but, again, the user would not have to take any action, would never have to fill out a form.
All this is very hypothetical, but I mention it merely to give an example of the way the network could evolve to defend itself. Clearly, as one of the linked, linked articles makes clear, AOL, suffering from the spambots, has an economic interest to move the Web to a more secure place.
Posted by: Lawrence Krubner | October 3, 2003 9:17 PM
This whole thing seems like a protocol that can be enacted, bringing security to users and nice profits to the facilitators of such technology.
Posted by: Camilo | October 6, 2003 11:17 AM
I watch big brother
Posted by: Steven | November 29, 2003 10:00 AM