IDblog ... an information design weblog

January 05, 2004
Marriage of technology and policy

Here are some (IMO) interesting items in the technology and policy space. Kottke points to a piece by Cory Doctorow. Here's an excerpt:

The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It's about realizing that all the really hard problems -- free expression, copyright, due process, social networking -- may have technical dimensions, but they aren't technical problems. ... [A]ll the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can't solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.

Kevin Werbach doesn't agree, but I'm sympathetic to Kottke's point that "technology is definitely playing the horse to policy's cart."

Meanwhile, Ev points to this from Joi Ito on, among other things, the power of the number 150 (popularized by Gladwell's ; see Robin Dunbar for the science).

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IDblog is Beth Mazur tilting at power law windmills. A little bit Internet, a little bit technology, a little bit society, and a lot about designing useful information products. Send your cards and letters to .

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