My wife mentioned to me this David Kestenbaum piece on NPR, 'How iMet My Neighbor on iTunes' (12 January), about Kestenbaum's experience with his unencrypted wireless. I post it here not just because it's a quirky story, but because it seems to me that it should be socially acceptable for someone to poach your wireless network, for non-nefarious purposes, of course, if it's unprotected: open encryption signals tacit approval. If I had more faith in people, I'd take the WEP off my own wireless, so I think it's great that other people are less gunshy.
Fundamentally, I believe that information, as stewarded by the Internet, has become a necessity in modernlife, a utility akin to electricity and water. Which is why it's disappointing that much of America is still not connected via highspeed broadband, esp. when you realize that seventy percent of adult Americans access the Internet, almost all of them daily.
I guess the 'Internets' isn't a trend. The San Francisco Chronicle (14 December 2006) article from above cites that, "Household bandwith demand continues to increase and is expected to reach approximately 1.1 terabits per month per household by 2010." Wow.
Check out the full Pew Internet and American Life site for similar remarkable details about the way the Internet, in an amazingly brief amount of time, has rooted itself, ineradicably, in our lives. I for one think this is a positive development, a societal seachange of the same caliber as writing and the wheel. Perhaps the most wholly democratizing force since the election of the first Athenian senate.
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