Are You a “Straight”?

by Greg Tirico

    

During a recent recording of This Week In Google, Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) pontificated about people that get it vs. the people that don’t.  People that get it, he argues, understand how to use the internet and the change it has brought about to propel themselves, their businesses and their industries to new levels of success.  Those that don’t get it (the “Straights”) watch as the industrialized world crumbles around them as they simultaneously try to recreate their world online.  Recreating a traditional business model online is typically not how the structural or societal nature of the internet works.  Those that know how to leverage this shift have the ability to create massive opportunities and subsequently monetize.

You can reference the death of the newspaper as a classic example or the heavy-handedlegal tactics that the RIAA has resorted to in an attempt to salvage what is left of their pre-internet revenue streams.

Continuing, Jeff Jarvis draws the battle lines between these two camps based on John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace“.  As was described during the recording, this declaration is nothing short of prophetic when considering that it was written in 1996. 

A brief quote from this piece:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Interesting and bordering on immoderate but poignant nonetheless.  The stepping stone for this entire conversation was the Italian government’s recent conviction of three Google executives for failing to remove content from YouTube. 

Who knew that Ferris Bueller was such a visionary?  ”Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”