Wednesday 7 November 2007

Francis Mckee

Can there be cultural boundaries in open source ideology.........? Discuss

1 comment:

Siobhan Verrall said...

The mainstreaming of You Tube, My Space, Facebook, Wikipedia and Flickr have radically impacted our way of life and how cultures operate. All these internet sites are based around the open source ideology of access for all through collaboration and communication of knowledge, music videos or photography. Cultural boundaries are diminished using internet sites such as these as long as you have internet access and a computer. The world becomes a smaller place due to people contributing and collaborating across different cultures, countries and through different languages to make a large and diverse network of people all sharing a common idea of free access of information for all. However, with cross culture interaction comes cultural specific viewpoints, bias, racial discrimination and disagreement of opinion. These sites do apply sanctions to try to avoid regional and cultural bias through the user being able to rate the product being offered and rate the credibility of the information. This allows everyone to have an opinion however, the middle ground of the vote will in a way decide whether the information is viable and credible. This helps remove extreme views, people taking advantage of sites using them for advertisement, and makes it very difficult for any group to censor and impose bias. A large and diverse editor base also provides access and breadth on subject matter that is otherwise inaccessible or little documented. As you can see there are strengths and weaknesses to open source ideology and there will always be people/organisations who will take advantage of free sites with large user ratings throughout the world, but as long as there are democratic sanctions in place which do not prevent freedom of speech then open ideology should not be infringed by cultural boundaries but be embraced.