>Peer-to-peer interaction is very useful in environments such as engineering,
>R&D, problem-solving essentially, where a dialogue is essential and
>exchange is more like rapid-fire. But it creates anarchy in terms of
>organizational communications as there is not much structure in the process.
But anarchy can be *good* when people are faced with overwhelming amounts
of information. Anarchy allows communities of interest to spring into
life, merge, divide, etc., without being stifled by bureaucracies. For the
on-line equivalent of talking in the hallways at a conference, where a
great of information is exchanged, anarchy is appropriate.
One problem with Usenet and even more with commercial forums like
CompuServe's, is that it's so hard to create, change and destroy such
communities. Actually, the appropriate syntax should be that the system
should allow communities to forum, mutate and die. If defunct Usenet
groups would just roll over and die, that would help...
>The producer-consumer model is an all pervasive model
Yeah, and that's one of the things that's seriously out of whack in our
society, I'd argue. That's why I compare our times to late medieval
Europe, when the church enforced the "producer-consumer model," as you say.
The printing press and paper changed the situation then; the personal
computer and digital network are changing it now.
I'm not advocating anarchy as a *replacement* for the dominant model, only
as a balance for it.
>My point is that we have not even scratched the surface of the
>network publishing model in terms of applications. We can effectively
>subsume the on-demand publishing (video on-demand, games on-demand etc.)
>applications very easily in this model. And, that is one of the reasons
>why it is so popular.
Small data point -- no one has demonstrated that video-on-demand or
games-on-demand will succeed. The only place that VOD works now is in
hotel rooms, but I supposed almost anyone will use it if you put them in a
strange city with nothing to do and no VCR. ;-)
Nick