Net Working - where's the catch?
A great article written in the 1990’s by Kevin Kelly (see above image) along with a recent contribution to WIRED by KK 2009
Incidentally, i took the image on my iPhone and emailed it to my desktop whilst tweeting and having supper…
I’m hoping i won’t end up in a Chinese Internet Book Camp
The New Socialism by Kevin Kelly June 2009
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks and shovels, we share apps, scripts and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.
i Sharing
The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, but it’s a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of photos taken with a digital camera are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the six billion videos served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organisations is huge: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for locations, Delicious for bookmarks.
Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.
ii Co-operation
When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared more than three billion photos on Flickr, but they have comprehensively tagged them with categories, labels and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets, and the whole thing is searchable. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally – if not outright communistically – your picture essentially becomes my picture. Anyone can use a photo once it’s posted, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don’t have to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can provide a far better one than I could take myself.
Full article can be read on wired
Posted by S-J White about 1 year ago in Creative Commons
About S-J White
S-J is a thirty-something creative director with a passion for design across both the modern marketing spectrum and film.