The age of Zombies (1993-96)
When the Internet began to
be used by consumers in 1993 and 1994 the role of the Internet user was largely
to be a passive consumer of other peoples web pages. The web was static and
read-only. Interactivity was a future-dream. This was the era of the web user
as zombie. No personality, not contributing anything, merely reading.
The age of Monkeys
(1996-2002)
By 1997, through the
introduction of ActiveX and Javascript, the web evolved to include form filing
as a means of interaction. The zombies were asked to step up to the role of
contributing information. Now we were monkeys. Learning to input text into
pre-defined forms and enabling the web to move from read-only to read-write.
Developers did some imaginative things to allow the creativity of the
users to impact content, but still, users were limited in their ability to
contribute. There was some personality, but highly constrained.
The age of Servants (2002-Present)
Portals emerged from the
first era of the web. These were huge centers of traffic where the Internet
users would hang out, reading stuff and filling in forms. Over time richer
forms of interactivity emerged inside these portals, and more recently
"social" portals have developed, where the user can hang out online,
and keep in touch with friends and colleagues through chat, IM, real-time
communication, forums and the like. Users are able to feel somewhat in control
of their experiences through personalization. Nonetheless, this era, still with us, is characterized by users
inhabiting an environment that does not give them ownership of the stuff they
produce. The data we create is not ours. The relationships we manage are not
ours. Whilst our presence and activity is essential to the life of these
environments, the environments exist mainly to gather us in large numbers
(reach) use up our time (engagement), and target us, in return for advertising
revenue (monetization).
Of course we derive
benefits, otherwise we would be slaves and not servants. But what we create is
not ours. In this era we are free to move around, pursuing our self-interest,
but we are not citizens. We are primarily servants of the landlord.
Data-Portability is an appropriate solution to one of the problems in this, the
current, era. It enables us, if implemented, to make a choice of landlord, and
to take our stuff with us when we move. However, it is predicated on the
assumption that we will have a service provider to whom we take our data. In
the future data ownership and control may be more pertinent than
data-portability. The current offerings from MySpace, FaceBook, Google and
Yahoo are all firmly part of the age of the servant. That doesn’t mean they are
bad. Indeed, the age of the citizen can only emerge if the current service
providers allow us access to data we host and create in their environments. But
they are limited.
The age of Citizens (coming soon?)
The future is one in which servants can evolve to become full citizens.
Our use of the Internet will be predicated on the assumption that a service
provider (a portal or a social portal or an application vendor) only
has rights to share the trail we leave in their environment, but not to own it.
Our data (about ourselves, our friends or our behavior) is ours and ours alone
to determine who can see it, and under what circumstances. For the first time
the user will enter the stage as a citizen, not a zombie, a monkey or a
servant.
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