A historian from the future is perusing my library shelf.\u00a0 She leafs through some books, scrolls through some PDFs.\u00a0 Hm, she thinks “they were really obsessed with sharing.\u00a0 Here’s a study of how sharing software code changed the software industry.\u00a0 Here’s a book about how sharing wireless networks led to new ways of providing communications access.\u00a0 And here’s a whole folder full of articles and books about the culture of the time, describing people sharing images, and ideas, more quickly and more easily than they could have before.\u00a0 But I don’t understand – what was so important about that kind of sharing?\u00a0 It’s fine to share media that are stored in a format that makes them instantly reproducible at extremely low cost, but how did this change their cuture?”<\/p>\n
My imagined future historian is struggling with determining how the low-barrier to entry sharing that is so central to digital culture might have broader and more distributed cultural effects.\u00a0 Sharing software code is easy: it can be duplicated perfectly and used over and over.\u00a0 There’s a magic to this kind of sharing – everyone can use the information, without diminishing the original source.\u00a0 But using this kind of sharing as a model for digital cultre is perhaps risky.\u00a0 Sometimes there are physical barriers, as in the case of wireless – it’s easy to share connectivity, but it’s harder to do in a way that doesn’t diminish the amount of bandwidth.\u00a0 Sharing culture (videos, images, ideas) has happened forever.\u00a0 The difference now is that ideas in the form of data are much more easily available, and easy to manipulate.<\/p>\n
So far, our historian concludes that the success\u00a0 sharing is intrinsically related to the properties of digital data; either its reproducability or the low barriers to participation that plentiful data provide.\u00a0 But she observes something else – that we are fascinated by the culture<\/em> of sharing even when it doesn’t have anything to do with these properties.\u00a0 When the barriers are high, and the objects physical.\u00a0 That explains this recent report by Latitude Research<\/a>, which investigates whether sharing online makes people more likely to share offline.\u00a0 They conclude that online sharing does inspire people to share offline – citing examples such as Freecycle, which I’ve used to give away various cumbersome household objects.\u00a0 They also argue that people are willing to share “office space<\/a>, travel accommodations<\/a>, textbooks<\/a>, kids clothes<\/a>, parking spaces<\/a>, garden plots<\/a>, private planes<\/a>, camera lenses<\/a>, luxury handbags<\/a>, boats<\/a>, household items<\/a>, and more<\/a>“.\u00a0 It’s not just stuff that we feel we want to share – it’s knowledge as well.\u00a0 My research on community wireless revealed that wireless groups can be incubators for policy change and knowledge exchange, even when they don’t succeed at connecting their communities.<\/p>\n But, my historian asks, “what’s distinctive about this, now?\u00a0 People have shared forever.\u00a0 Digital culture does not inspire us to lend our neighbour a drill.”\u00a0 She goes to the park, sits down and thinks about what happened in (our) time:\u00a0 Global restructuring of capital kept people in work, made cities more cosmopolitan, and changed the likelihood of meeting one’s neighbours.\u00a0 Formal education systems became more rigorous.\u00a0 Major financial institutions failed.\u00a0 Across all of this continued the practices that were first associated with digital media.\u00a0 It almost began to seem as if digital media made sharing possible.<\/p>\n It hasn’t, of course.\u00a0 An economy based on shared code has emerged because of the properties of code, the norms surrounding its production, and the cultural shift that our historian is investigating.\u00a0 But one of the things that she’s observing is that these norms, and this culture, are powerful, and impacting a set of things from “open” movements to “open source hardware” to “coworking” and “hacklabs” that are not exactly<\/em> new but which have a new cultural inflection.\u00a0 In investigating the opportunities and limits of these norms and culture, she has more than enough to work on.\u00a0 Doesn’t she?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A historian from the future is perusing my library shelf.\u00a0 She leafs through some books, scrolls through some PDFs.\u00a0 Hm, she thinks “they were really obsessed with sharing.\u00a0 Here’s a study of how sharing software code changed the software industry.\u00a0 Here’s a book about how sharing wireless networks led to new ways of providing communications […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[10,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-musings","category-technology-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pUfdR-5r","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=337"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/337\/revisions\/340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonpowell.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}