I don't know whether or I'd go so far as to call it a turning point of western civilization.... but it is definitely a cultural turning point, I think. The internet and the digital age have definitely changed things forever.
I think for me, the first defining moment where I felt the tide beginning to change, was the shut down of Napster. Indeed, corporations, and especially those industries dealing with any kind of media or intellectual property (music, movies, software, etc), were the first wave. That kind of defined in my mind the moment where the internet changed from being a free and mostly unregulated place, and the struggle began. Surely, with the advent of e-commerce and anti-piracy campaigns, the internet was no longer just a place for 'geeks' or academics anymore, who could freely share whatever information they wanted to. And yet, online piracy still goes on today, all of our attempts to stop it, and I have little confidence that's going to change any time soon.
Other kinds of media have followed-- news, journalism, the rise of bloggers, social media, etc. This has naturally had effects on politics and social discourse. Now the old distribution outlets of news media are on their toes, like the record companies before them, trying to either compete and backlash, or change with it. And now most recently, with WikiLeaks, government has been very publicly hit.
This something that has been brewing for quite a while now already, with wikiLeaks being just another recent bullet in an otherwise very long list of events. It has occurred in multiple waves, and surely more to come.
So yeah, I think you could say this is part of the over all cultural shift, that the digital age has brought about. I don't think it's the end of civilization, or anything apocalyptic like that, but it has changed society.
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I think for me, the first defining moment where I felt the tide beginning to change, was the shut down of Napster. Indeed, corporations, and especially those industries dealing with any kind of media or intellectual property (music, movies, software, etc), were the first wave. That kind of defined in my mind the moment where the internet changed from being a free and mostly unregulated place, and the struggle began. Surely, with the advent of e-commerce and anti-piracy campaigns, the internet was no longer just a place for 'geeks' or academics anymore, who could freely share whatever information they wanted to. And yet, online piracy still goes on today, all of our attempts to stop it, and I have little confidence that's going to change any time soon.
Other kinds of media have followed-- news, journalism, the rise of bloggers, social media, etc. This has naturally had effects on politics and social discourse. Now the old distribution outlets of news media are on their toes, like the record companies before them, trying to either compete and backlash, or change with it. And now most recently, with WikiLeaks, government has been very publicly hit.
This something that has been brewing for quite a while now already, with wikiLeaks being just another recent bullet in an otherwise very long list of events. It has occurred in multiple waves, and surely more to come.
So yeah, I think you could say this is part of the over all cultural shift, that the digital age has brought about. I don't think it's the end of civilization, or anything apocalyptic like that, but it has changed society.