Libraries, digital or print, are institutions designed to treat intellectual property as a educational resource in the public interest, and are typically governed by copyright regimes. And communities, at least virtual and pre-capitalist ones, have no intellectual property at all, and are governed by gift exchange cultures. None of these metaphors helps us make sense of the problem of managing intellectual property in digital networks, because each of them replaces urgent questions with premature answers, mythological answers at that. This talk will offer some observations about public access technology projects in libraries, schools, underserved communities, and developing countries with some ideas for avoiding problems in the future. This paper proposes and documents seven propositions about predicting technologies, and concludes with reflections on how each new technology is not merely a system of machines with certain functions, but rather is part of a social world.
Prediction is very difficult, even for experts.
Extrapolations are not reliable predictors. New technologies are often market-driven, not technology driven. The best technology does not always win in the marketplace. Even at their first introduction, new technologies are not merely utilitarian. A technology's symbolic meanings may determine its uses.