If someone like Jonathan Zittrain says the sky is falling, it could be a distinct possibility. Zittrain who teaches at Oxford and is co-founder of the Berkman Center did a short interview with Wired, he says he sees an Internet filled with so much dangerous spyware, badware and malicious spam that “smart users will be driven to dumber appliances like Blackberries, iPods and X-boxes.
“ My worry is that users will drift into gated communities defined by their hardware or their network,” he tells Wired. They’ll switch to information appliances that are great at what they do [email, music, games] because they’re so tightly controlled by their makers.”
Zittrain says it won’t take much to drive users into gated communites tightly managed by Apple, Microsoft or another proprietary maker. All it would take, he says is one more worldwide virus that knocks out corporate internets and erases hard drives. Wired asks him if the sky is really falling. He says yes. But he doesn’t say it to shock, it’s a matter of fact statement regarding where we are headed. And just to mix it up a bit, he says the shift may be so subtle, we may not even realize what’s happening.
[By the time] it falls,” he says, “It may seem perfectly normal. It’s entirely possible that the past 25 years will seem like an extended version of the infatuation we once had with CB radio, when we thought that it was the great new power to the people. ”
While waiting for the new book, check out “The Generative Internet” , which caused quite a commotion when it was published last summer.