by Massimiliano Fanni Canelles
On 3 July 1969, Professor Leonard Kleinrock transmitted part of a word from one computer to another, physically more than 500 km away. Considered a visionary, prophesied a future characterized by the presence of a network “always working, always available, present in all places and freely accessible to all.” That future and that network is now reality. Every day, millions of people navigate and work on the Internet. Web 2.0 has profoundly changed the way we live and work. Not only that. It has become the land on which relations take place, information, revolutions, wars. Some governments try to control it, but without success. “The network is irresistible because it is a global and globally neutral” (A. Bogliolo). It allows anyone to express themselves and make space for creativity. It allows a free collaboration between millions of users, who, as a huge puzzle, can become part of a project, an ideal, a goal, an end product that often has greater complexity and sophistication to what could give an individual working group. The key word for this phenomenon is a wiki, an open system that allows each one to add their own piece: a service, an experience, a customer. Wiki is a software, journalism, information and knowledge. It is a system of voluntary cooperation, which sweeps everything. Even the scientific community at first accepted, not without difficulty, the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and is then converted to the system with Wikigenes, a search engine supported by SloanKettering Memorial Cancer Center, site of the first experiment for the transfer of information contained in human genes. WikiLeaks fits into this scenario. It impose international attention divulging confidential information concerning the political, financial and eliciting reactions disparate between who promote freedom of expression and who invoke the threat of destabilization of established power. Irrespective of the position assumed in this regard, the issue of network security is still a real problem. It is necessary to protect the details, safeguard the privacy and to prevent the disclosure and use of information for non-legitimate purposes. The free movement of ideas is an essential vehicle for social and economic development of modern countries, but, as happens in the real world, even criminality in the network can happen as totally unacceptable. Cybercrime to contrast by decision, but that should not be an excuse to oppose the new cultural movement, and collaborative “open source”, which puts into question the very concept of intellectual property aimed at profit. The Creative Commons the new alternatives to copyright, they are invading the net and weaken the idea of property and commercial rights to which the multinationals take their profits. A revolution in the revolution, a new way of life as opposed to the current values consist of competition, confrontation, search for power and wealth at any cost. 10 years ago, Amazon was just a river in South America, Yahoo! a word coined by Jonathan Swift’s of Gulliver’s Travels, Google formed the an infinite number of number and a one hundred zeros. Thanks for the network, and its feature of linking millions of users, the world as we know it today will never be the same. The network as a single planetary intelligence a single man as his cell carrier are perhaps realizing the Mayan prophecy that foresees, in 2012, the end of the world as we know it.
Translated by Martina Delser
