This morning I came across an interesting post on Discourse.net, a blog by Professor Michael Froomkin of the University of Miami School of Law. What the Law of the Sea Teaches Us About the Regulation of the Information Ocean which was the title of an address that he delivered at a recent conference.
I am always intrigued about the rich metaphorical power of the sea. On the Sea-Fever Consulting website I wrote:
We believe that the sea is a strong and effective metaphor for business. Both present an ever changing environment and those that don’t adjust can find themselves far off course or worse. Successfully sailing across the sea requires teamwork, also a characteristic of high performing organizations.
On Discourse.net Professor Froomkin wrote:
The root causes of these two dangers have much in common: just as the Internet is one of the most exciting and even defining technological developments of our time, so too the sailing ship was a crowning technological achievement of its day. A tall ship is a highly complex machine that requires enormous organization and technical expertise to run properly. In broad terms the same is true of a complex network. Both depend on an extensive external infrastructure, be they boatwrights and ship’s chandlers or fab labs and electrical and telephone networks. (A critical difference, however, is that the tall ship required a well-drilled team to work properly. In a good network the work tends to be more distributed and in a really good network it may be more fault-tolerant as well.)
Not sure if the Professor is a sailor but it sounds like he understands tall ships.
If you are interested in technology and how its rapid and continuous advancement can overtake our ability to manage or regulate it, you will probably find this interesting too.
Technorati tags: technology, law, regulation
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