Zook Suit Riot! (Part 1)

I must admit that I was a bit biased coming into this course about the concentration of Internet enterprises in larger metropolitan areas, such as Silicon Valley. I have always ate up the highly romantic, American dreamy notion that any Joe Blow can go out and start a highly successful website from the boonies, without needing to move to San Francisco to do it. Zook's argument seems pretty plausible to me to this point, however.

It is interesting to me how he views venture capitalists as "technological gatekeepers" (59) when it comes to start-up Internet ventures, and this is fascinating to realize that the gatekeepers of information and products for society as a whole are, in fact, subservient to gatekeeping themselves. This presents some of the struggles presented in "Digitizing the News" by Mr. Pablo, as an idea being a creative success was far from always the same as being a commercial success. It's almost as though the venture capitalists have been stuck playing Double Jeopardy with the dot-com boom, as there is at once a pressure to be the first on the bandwagon, as well as a need to research companies and know what one is getting into.

I do think that, as technology continues to evolve, we will find more and more ways for the so-called tacit knowledge to be transferred effectively from firms/individuals that are not located geographically near each other, however. We have seen the trend come with multi-national firms encompassing ever more broad expanses of land across different continents, and yet they have managed to maintain integrated marketing communications, procedures, and standards even within bounds of differing cultures. Yes, we do largely "learn through interaction" (51), but this interaction is going to only continue to become more possible as technology advances beyond geographical restraints.