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Mediamatic/Special: Rambling Thoughts on Reality Engineering

How could you deal with the internet, master-infrastructure of our world, and totally escape from contemporary society? It's impossible. As soon as you think twice about computer technology, you end up thinking about how technology structures, shapes, engineers, designs society, your life, your interactions...

You all know the stories: the success of the peer-to-peer networks, the copyright issues that came from that and from the use of samples made easy by all the digitizing equipment. The sometimes horrifying stories concerning the regulating of the Internet; the spying possibilities built in software; the demand for better filtering. Or, on the other hand, the success of Open Source and Linux. You cannot but ask the question - also if you don't understand a lot about computers -: wait a minute, how do we want to work with this, how do we want to organize this world?

Working in this field, you end up talking and thinking about questions concerning standards, protocols - how are they designed and how should they be designed? How open are the standards and protocols, what do they allow and what not? And since you're not only dealing with the building blocks of your computer and your own little network, but with the protocols that shape or engineer the basic infrastructure of contemporary society, you get to the question: how's the Reality engineered by these protocols, these standards, this software, this infrastructure? What exactly is the connection between protocols and society? How should we conceptualize that interaction?

(http://www.mediamatic.net/article-200.6007.html&q_keyword=200.194)