"LONDON (Reuters) - The rise of gadgets like the iPhone, Blackberry and Xbox threatens to unravel the decades of innovation that helped to build the Internet, a leading academic has warned in a new book.
Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are sealed, "sterile" boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology.
Unlike home computers, new Internet-enabled gadgets don't lend themselves to the sort of tinkering and collaboration that leads to technological advances, he says.
The mix of gadgets, over-regulation and Internet security fears could destroy the old system where mainstream technology could be "influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field."
"I don't want to see a two-tier world where only the experts can survive ... and the non-experts are stuck between something they don't understand and something that limits them," Zittrain told Reuters in an interview."
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