ours v. theirs

Isn't it funny how when you use something all of the time you start to feel a sense of ownership in it? I use my yahoo email every day...and I think I own it.

When I was a kid, I thought everything in our house was mine. Didn't you? Even when my parents told me I did not own it all, I still thought it belonged to me.

I suppose this is really the deal with the Internets. We don't own it. We just use it. A lot.

I recently started another wikipedia page. I thought I could post up some interesting information about my professor who wrote that book and it would be expanded on and improved upon by the world. Instead, they wanted to delete my page not 15 minutes after I wrote it. I mentioned this to Brent and he told me about this quote from David Weinburger:

"The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.
...
So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of 'open' is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of 'open' is 'theirs.'"

This is completely what happened to me: I went from being part of the group, a new Wikipedian to them, someone who tried to join the group, but was immediately shown the door. And I donate to Wikipedia!

I feel like boingboing.net belongs to me too because I go there every day and I love all the stuff they post. I hope I don't lose that happy feeling of community member there. But it does not belong to me anymore than I own my yahoo email. These things could go away or just bar me from participating and there would be nothing I could do.

I guess the bottom line, as with many things, is openness and transparency.

The good news is that my wikipedia site made the cut. Someone saved it.