IT IS ENGLISH BLOG

“Tethered technologies” have this name because the consumer, you, me, whoever, is tethered like an animal at the end of a long rope-like wired or wireless digital connection, restrained and restricted in what we can do with the technology by the all-seeing, all-knowing Big Brother type controller at the command centre.   

Jonathan Zittrain, a Professor at the “Oxford Internet Institute”  writes in  “THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET AND HOW TO STOP IT” about the “sterile appliances tethered to a network of control” that he sees as being the future of the internet if we do not reclaim for it the “generative PCs”  and “generative networks”that were its original thrust.  His book is available for free download in PDF or other formats, and I would recommend that anyone interested in the internet, or indeed in the future in the widest sense, read it – and tell your friends about it too!

Appliances that are described as tethered include some big consumer favourites like the IPod, IPhone, Xbox and Tivo.  However, he is not just concerned with these devices, but with the growing move towards centrally controlled gadgets that may become increasingly important to our lives. They lend themselves to being easily controlled from the corporation that manufactures them and at a distance, hence the metaphor implicit in the term “tethered”.  They could also be easily misused by a malign government to implement cheap and easy surveillance and control of a population as they relay back information on the way they have been used, so giving a unique insight into the life-style and choices of the gadget user.

The following are both interesting reviews of Zittrain’s book:

The Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman writes in “Are gadgets killing the internet?”.

ETYM

From the Verb Tether - to tie an object or an animal, e.g. a horse, a goat or a sheep,  to something so that it will stay in a particular area.

William Wordsworth writes of a tethered lamb:

Drink, tethered consumer, drink!  If you wish.  But let us not go blindly, like lambs to the slaughter.

The Free Dictionary defines the noun tether firstly as:

“A rope, chain, or similar restraint for holding an animal in place, allowing a short radius in which it can move about.”
It is worth reading the rest of the item and thinking carefully about why Professor Zittrain has focussed on the word “tethered“.  Do we really want to be restrained or restricted in our use of this medium that was built on such an ethos of freedom, “as in free speech, not as in free beer”, as they say?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software