AUTHORITY
Authority is an extremely interesting concept. Across all cultures, physical and virtual, something has/gives some the authority to make decisions about others.
In the physical sense, government has the authority to dictate how people should and should not act. They create laws and people must abide by them, regardless of if they agree with them or not. The government of Virginia decided that interracial marriage was illegal. If you broke the law, you would punished. It is widely known that intermixing was not legal either, so if two people had children together, their child would be considered a mulatto (mixed) and would not be given the same opportunities as white folk. At some times, people had so much authority that if someone even looked intermixed, they could decide there if they were colored or not, drastically altering the individuals’ lifestyle.
Virtual authority comes into the picture when describing the anything technological. The biggest argument for authority in technology is of freedom. Apple controls everything. They give their users limited access to the wealth and depth of knowledge provided. The upside to this technique is that usage is very simple and easy to learn. Android on the other hand releases their authority. Android users can access everything on the operating system, changing whatever they feel and making the device, theirs.
Stallman would side with Android on their technique of granting authority to everyday people. He says that sharing makes everything better and everything that is, is built from everything that came before it. This is seen in every high school students’ research resource: Wikipedia. Wikipedia grants users the authority by allowing anyone and everyone to edit their pages. Obviously this is monitored and one needs to provides sources to ensure truth in the edits, but that’s a pretty spectacular method.