I am in Chamonix right now, working on my book Shaping-Network-Society. There are lots of little tidbits of insights that I have posted to this blog over the last years and so yesterday night, I had the idea of downloading all entries and then picking and choosing what would be useful for the book.
There is a function in Wordpress to download all blog-entries as .pdfs. Which I did, but when starting to copy-paste, I was confronted with lots of annoying formatting problems. So I decided to do an xml-dump, hoping it would be easier to parse through hundreds of pages in a word processor. This is what I got:
...<guid isPermaLink="false">http://importer9.wordpress.com /2006/08/04/governance-in-network-society/</guid> [CDATA[On Monday, I was in Mexico City, invited by Lourdes (the president of CIAPEM)
Now of course, I know that technically, there are many things I could do with the xml-file. But the questions that the Google Data Liberation Front asks of any online service are pertinent in today’s network society.
- Can I get my data out at all?
- How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
- How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?
Think about if you ever would want to leave Facebook, Picassa, Twitter, Gmail, or Xing, but take your data with you. These questions are fundamental to our network societies and clearly express the political tension between networks as choice communities and the path dependency inherent in the participation in networks.
These issues are much more important to society in the 21st Century than the silly debate on if Journalism will survive the internet. Should we be worried that Google seems to be one of the few political theorists of network society? Will we refer to them as the distributed/crowd-sourced Thomas Hobbes of their time in 300 years? Or is this taken directly out of Monthy Python’s Life of Brian?
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