Via Anil Dash, I read this very thoughtful look at walls in the real world and in the online world, and the value and difference of both. Here, Danah Boyd reflects that we tend to look at walls in meatspace as generally a good thing; they keep things in, they keep things out, they provide privacy, shelter, etc. In the real world, the concept of a walled garden is not always bad -- often, there are beautiful things inside, and if the walls were gone, so would be the beauty.
In the online community, Danah says:
In the tech circles in which i run, the term "walled gardens" evokes a scrunching of the face if not outright spitting. I shouldn't be surprised by this because these are the same folks who preach the transparent society as the panacea. But i couldn't help myself from thinking that this immediate revulsion is obfuscating the issue... so i thought i'd muse a bit on walled gardens.
The interesting point here is that the idea of the online walled garden pretty much originated with AOL -- and it was a true walled garden, in that you were either in or out. Today, search gives us the ability to at the very least see into these walled gardens, so how walled are they, anyway?
Per my post on translucent PR, I think there is value in having an individual or a company have the ability to set the dial on how much/how little gets exposed, both online and off. Whether this is is in our future, given the huge financial incentives of companies who are looking to trade on what is essentially *our* data, that's an open question.