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So, I just finished reading an article about wordpress.com going down for a bit and began thinking about whether or not the “Cloud” is a good or bad thing.

I’m worried that the cloud is just the latest manifestation of consumer laziness. We live in a world that is dominated by computer devices, but how many of us know rudimentary coding or computer science skills?

It makes me think of books. When books had to be written individually by scribes, they were expensive and literacy was a mark of nobility. However, once the printing press was developed and books were mass produced literacy rates soared. Why isn’t the same thing happening with coding and computer science?

We live in a world where code is easily accessible. With a little motivation and a few Google searches you can find how to code just about anything. Additionally, the coding languages are getting easier and easier to use but still very few users understand even the basics of programming. Instead we have the few that understand programming and they are considered a special class of user.

What would the world be like if instead of sites like YouTube, we had individual web servers at each persons home? Those home servers could submit their content to large aggregation tools such as Google or maybe they would interact with each other in an unimagined version of peer to peer social media.

I think the cloud is going to make a whole generation of lazy consumers that see the Internet as a strange black-box technology, instead of creating a group of highly motivated and innovative consumers that are defining for themselves what the Internet is and can be.