It is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code.
- Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd)June 26, 2009
This is an excerpt from How Will Twitter Be Governed?, from June 2009:
To a great extent, Twitter is ours, like the air we breathe.
So, how will Twitter be governed? As a tool owned by a company that is owned by the inventors and some wealthy investors? Or as a world in which we live, and in which we have inalienable rights?
The entertainment business tried to say they owned all art, all music, all movies. We know they are artifacts produced by our culture, which we share with the artists, and the controls that the entertainment business thought they had – copyright and DRM – have failed with the digital and web revolution.
So, here we have the same revolution, come home again. Twitter’s world – its conventions, meaning and use – is our artifact: we have built it, 140 characters at a time, just as the Twitter developers have been building the platform underneath our feet. But it is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code.
Twitter’s management continues to forget this. They tolerate us, but Twitter’s method is not to celebrate us.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/141428009707
