Autore: Miconi, Andrea
Titolo: L'origine delle disuguaglianze. note su capitale e rete nel XXI secolo
Periodico: Problemi dell'informazione
Anno: 2014 - Fascicolo: 3 - Pagina iniziale: 337 - Pagina finale: 360

It is common belief that the Web in its commercial development has given up its original ideology, moving from being the realm of hyperlinking to becoming a system of proprietary platforms. Even the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, insisted on this point and warned against the rise of walled gardens. Users are walling themselves off from the cyberspace for a technical reason, according to Berners-Lee: while Web pages were given an URI (or URL) address, social network sites are not anymore. As a consequence, there is no way to get information out of private archives, so the Web is splitting up into separated environments. There are actually many good points in Berners-Lee's statement. Walled gardens do threaten the future of the Web, so much so that we are witnessing an alternation between two different forms of sovereignty: Google's open system and Facebook's closed one. Nonetheless, Berners-Lee is too optimistic with respect to the original features of his creation. This is why I will provide a critical analysis of the Web's early history - particularly focusing on the differences between Berners-Lee's hypertext and Ted Nelson's Xanadu - in order to detect the roots of inequality and show how the new infrastructure served as a vehicle for neo-liberal strategies. Moreover, this analysis will make it necessary a new reading of the general theory of the network society, also in the light of David Harvey's and Thomas Piketty's investigations of late capitalism.




SICI: 0390-5195(2014)3<337:LDDNSC>2.0.ZU;2-K
Testo completo: http://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1445/79207
Testo completo alternativo: http://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1445/79207

Esportazione dati in Refworks (solo per utenti abilitati)

Biblioteche ACNP che possiedono il periodico