My Experiments with OpenSource Kumar Abhishek's Weblog

You might find the title very tongue in cheek But anyways.. Read On!!..
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Societies and communities are children of communication. Their shape, size, behavior and scope depends only on the way its units, that is, we the people, communicate. The very basis of a society or a community is inter-individual communication for fulfillment of mutual interests. They have evolved with evolution of mankind and its intelligence. And in every age, technology played a crucial role in defining how we communicate and thus directly impacting our social life and structure.

It was not long ago (not even 250 years ago!) when most of us lived all our life in the confinement of hardly couple of tens of miles of the place where we were born as there was no swift means of transportation and traveling was difficult. World for us was indeed a small place back then and community meant handful of people who were invariably either neighbors or relatives. But then one fine day in the recent history, automobiles hit those dusty roads which were once trodden only by tough hooves of horses and oxen. World suddenly became wider and bigger and certainly more interesting. Things got even better when automobiles became a commonplace and aircrafts started to clutter the skies making men, women and avian alike. Cross culture interaction was happening everywhere and societies were developing varieties in it! You could have tuna in Shanghai and salmon in Morocco because logistics was no challenge anymore! Soon everyone was talking over the telephone and mobiles made every individual available 27x7 making his or her physical location almost immaterial. Mails took not even a day to cross the mighty Atlantic and thanks to cable T.V, everyone knew what is happening in the other half of the world! We had limitless communication channels made available to us and distance, which once tested endurance limits of swaggering explorers, was being ridiculed every day. World seemed a smaller place once again, very much like how it was 200 years ago. But we never have enough of innovation do we? This time innovation was the Internet. Email, Instant messengers, web pages, information was everywhere and every soul was communicating via this novel channel. Silently, mankind stepped into an age, where information was no constraint. Commonsense was skewed so as to take information for granted. Silently, mankind left the much celebrated legacy of industrial age behind and with much pomp and show we entered into the Information Age.

But the story I am about to tell you is not of the age in which static web pages coded in HTML flooded the cyberspace oozing information from every direction in almost all conceivable genre. The story is about that age in which content on the net was being created daily in volumes exceeding any measure ever known to the history in form of blogs, discussion forums and mailing lists. This is the age of Googles and Youtubes and Wikipedias. This age got everyone working together, collaborating over the network and giving birth to innovation that virtually redefined the term 'INFORMATION'! Yes! This story is of the new era of collaboration and mutual exchange of expertise facilitated by the network. We are talking about the Participation Age.

When the dot-com “bubble” busted, it had a devastating effect on the technology business oriented around the web. Many companies went out of business and venture capitalists, who invested their millions into the dot-coms and what was called the “information highway”, suffered enormous losses. The root cause of this mishap was the overestimation of pervasiveness of Internet and miscalculations of the reach of computers. But no mistake in the history of mankind would have been a bigger blessing! Little did anyone know, that the billions which were then giving sore throats to the IT industry, were actually spent in paving path for a new beginning. In less than three years, we witnessed the revival of Internet oriented businesses. But this time Internet had better bandwidth, more number of users and better hardware support. Technologies like PHP, Perl and Java which powered the last avatar of Internet had also matured and nascent technologies like AJAX, XML, Ruby etc had made their maiden entry into the developers arena. The web became more and more interactive day by day and the traditional “Request-Serve” model started to blur. One fine day we all realized that Web 2.0 was here and this time, it was here to stay!

 Click here to go to the next part of Student's Guide to Participation Age - Part II, The Action