THE DIGITAL BOUNDARIES OF SHARING
The following article is reblogged from Paula Bialski’s blog
As a sociologist plopped into an interdisciplinary environment run mainly by media philosophers and media historians (Digital Cultures Research Lab where I’ve been working for the past year [2014]), I was surrounded by questions that made me re-think the way in which basic social problems come to exist. The problem I was recently trying to unpack was one of sharing – a sociological (as well as economic and anthropological) problem which can be linked to all sorts of notions of kinship, gift-giving, markets, trust, friendship, and reciprocity, among others. I stumbled across the idea of sharing and reciprocity during my doctoral work, where I spent a few years conducting ethnography with couchsurfers and ride-sharers who told me a bit or two about the values of reciprocity, and what sharing was really all about. But along came these media studies and software studies nerds and told me that media, interfaces, and software, as well as the geeks who make such software, do indeed largely contribute to what is being shared, with whom, and for what purposes. If anybody out there has suggestions on great ways of unpacking the technological infrastructure that influences our social practices – (STS folks, ANT folks, software studies folks?) – let me know.
So, Paula, here are some thoughts from Liza about sharing and computing.
1) Information, specifically digital stuff, is categorically different from the kinds of stuff we used to learn about in physics and philosophy. Matter, or physical stuff, has weight and takes up space. If you move it from one place to another it is gone from the first location.
A piece of bread is a physical object
It takes time to move it over a distance. If I give you a diamond ring I don’t have it any more. To share it with you I must either give up my possession of it or divide it in some way so that it is a fundamentally different object and the original is destroyed. It makes sense to sell such stuff because when I transfer it to you I experience a loss.
Concepts, or abstract stuff, like love, beauty, honor and evil, are, well, abstract, they have no physical existence. They can be shared infinitely. Perhaps they have no meaning or existence if they are not shared by sentient beings. The quantity, the number of experiences of each concept, increases when they are shared. Their value, in the economic sense, is incalculable. What about information, a computer program or a poem or a bank account balance? These are patterns carried on a physical medium (say, a disk drive) but infinitely replicable. A copy is just as good as the original and the cost of making and transmitting the copy is negligible compared to the cost of creating the first one. Once I’ve created a computer program or a poem I lose nothing by sharing it — well, the bank account may be a red herring. More on that later.
My point is that we need to explore the conventions of reciprocity for information to see if we want different rules to apply to it — rules different from those we use for matter and abstract ideas. Our contemporary conventions surrounding ownership, copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, user licensing and fair use are not working very well in this new information age. They may actually be inhibiting large sections of the world population from benefiting from this kind of “wealth”.
2) You say (above) “media, interfaces, and software, as well as the geeks who make such software, do indeed largely contribute to what is being shared, with whom, and for what purposes.” This is true when you are looking at the mechanics of sharing physical stuff (e.g. ebay that facilitates the exchange goods) or services that are physically limited stuff (a night’s occupancy of a couch or transportation of a person from Berlin to London). A more profound instance of sharing is encountered when the “stuff” is infinitely reproducible information that gains value in proportion to the number of people who use it.
3) The geeks you mention spend their lives creating and sharing information, the nonphysical stuff that they still have even after they give it away or sell it.
Geeks probably sharing information
Even if they aren’t thinking consciously about it, these folks — IT folks — are living in a world where the consequences of sharing and reciprocity are fundamentally different from our familiar market system of exchanging goods and services. Their limitations are not based on physical space, natural resources, time and cost of transportation, or cost of manufacture. Rather, their resources are individual brainpower, shared know-how, access to computing equipment (which is becoming exponentially cheaper and more available) and installed base of users. The only scarce resource is their mental labor which they usually delight in exercising. Two consequences of this situation are the open source software movement and its companion, open educational resources. Our producer-consumer society is struggling to figure out how to integrate these and similar developments without causing major disruption to our existing distribution systems.
Paula, IMHO, if we want to unpack “the technological infrastructure that influences our social practices” we would do well to expand on these three themes and incorporate them into our theoretical frame. I expect that others in your Digital Cultures Research Lab are already discussing these points. Perhaps we could encourage them to share their work with the academically-unwashed, English-speaking public by contributing to this blog and yours.