Interesting conversation today with Xavier about the "grid computing" as a new social paradigm. According to the Wikipedia:

"Grid computing is an emerging computing model that distributes processing across a parallel infrastructure. Throughput is increased by networking many heterogeneous resources across administrative boundaries to model a virtual computer architecture. For a computing problem to benefit from a grid, it must require either large amounts of computation time or large amounts of data, and it must be reducible to parallel processes that do not require intensive inter-communication."

Why do I blog this? It's mostly the "data" part that interests me here. What this grid metaphor means is that everyone's a resource. Imagine if everything that is on your computer is connected to others: there aren't any intention about what you share (unlike, for example, certain P2P systems in which you choose what you want to share with others). This non-intentionality may have important consequences. The fact that you're a node and share stuff is an intentional act, unless this becomes a "norm" and that you're not even aware of it.