ICTS AND SOCIETY: THE SALZBURG APPROACH - ICT&S

ICTs and Society: The Salzburg Approach
careful deployment of wise, critical, and integrative assessment and design approaches.
The Internet has to be the special target of such design practices as it is already
the central digital platform where all modern ICTs are converging. In future this
convergence process will only intensify further, especially with respect to the Web.
Thus, the vision of a GSIS can only be achieved by carefully shaping the Net’s
techno-social architecture according to the above mentioned values and aims. The
Salzburg Approach’s way to think about this fundamental design process is to comprehend
the Net as a technology for cooperation. In this regard, the notion of cooperation
can be grasped as an abbreviation of the general GSIS-aims, but interpreted
according to the special techno-social space of the Net.
Fortunately, such a comprehension of the Net as a technology for cooperation
does not have to be achieved from scratch. Quite contrary, the fundamental development
and early usage of the Internet as well as later of the Web has been done
in a basic social spirit of code-openness, cooperation, as well as free sharing of
data, information, and knowledge. The following quotation from Tim Berners-Lee’s
book “Weaving the Web”, where he tells the story of his invention of the Web’s basic
architecture, gets this attitude to the point: “The web is more a social creation
than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect – to help people work together
– and not as technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and
improve our weblike existence in the world” (Berners-Lee 1999, 123).
In fact, it can be easily asserted that the Web as we know it today could not have
come into existence, if it would not have been designed as a decentralized, modular,
and open architecture of participation based on open source in the first place.
The same is, of course, true for the Internet as a whole, on which the Web rests
upon. The Net is based on the visionary thoughts and design actions of the “wizards”
of the early Internet in the tradition of J.C.R. Licklider, who laid the most basic
architecture. This was done just as well in the prospect of enhancing human
communication and cooperation via computational means, leading to network design
solutions that would not inhibit the future development and prospering of this architecture
(what ever might come in future).
Hofkirchner | Fuchs | Raffl | Schafranek | Sandoval | Bichler 28