Participation Literacy

What is needed to make Law 2.0 applicable to legal research is for standards to emerge: how courts and agencies will preserve their work (html or pdf?), how they will announce it (RSS?), how they will categorize it (tags?), and how we will search it (guess who?).

The quotation above is from a blog “published by a general counsel in the Midwest”. Even though many Web pages mention the concept, there are no serious discussions or analyses about what it means. The quote above is from one of the highest ranked pages at Google, which means many other pages linked to it – it is a good example of how banal it might seem when Web 2.0 is starting to get attention in an old practice. Besides the Web 2.0 notes in the quote above, I often see concepts and phrases like “open source law” and “participatory law” on the Internet.

I miss a discussion of how Web 2.0 will influence laws regarding the life on the Web, for example: the Web as platform and collective intelligence. When people start to use native Web software in a large scale, another step is taken towards the international netizen (or what we are to call them). It will be more and more absurd to have people from the same community connected to different law systems. Another problem which we have not seen yet, is when collective intelligence starts to do things, which can be regarded as being outside the law. Who is to be held responsible when the criminal is a collective with inseparable individuals?

Still, it will be very interesting to follow what law can make of concepts such as participatory the next few years. Who are being allowed to participate? Is it between lawyers? Is it participation in the whole law community, i.e. both lawyers and prosecutors and judges? Or will they even invite people outside the law community to participate, and what about criminals – and in that case, why?

Is it impossible to envision an international law model on the Web where embodiment is beside the point? This would demand a world wide agreement on Web laws, and an agreement among countries to enforce the punishment stated in the Web Law. These kinds of thoughts counteracts the freedom philosophy of the Web stated by for example John Perry Barlow and his cult text A Cyberspace Independence Declaration (1996). It is even possible to think of a native law system. A Web native law system would mean that both cause and effect is situated to the Web. In ten years or so, it might be a sufficient punishment for most law violations to be locked out from sections of the Web.