The casual visitor to cyberspace might understandably consider free software, Wikipedia, Facebook, remix music and "open textbooks" as wildly different phenomena. But as author and Senior Lear Center Fellow David Bollier explains in a series of video interviews with Director Marty Kaplan, they are all instances of the commons, a new paradigm for creating valuable things on the Internet.
A commons arises whenever a community decides it wants to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access and sustainability, said Bollier. His describes how people share photos on Flickr.com; how scientists collectively manage their published articles and research databases; and how Grateful Dead fans created and curated their own archives of concert performance tapes -- a precursor to the type of sharing that is now common among Internet enthusiasts.
"Sometimes the commons works in competition with markets, and sometimes it collaborates with them," said Bollier, "but in either instance, the commons is demonstrating that online communities can self-organize themselves to produce some remarkable types of shared wealth. It will increasingly be a sector of economic production."
Bollier's video interviews with Kaplan were produced by Brave New Studios, an affiliate of Robert Greenwald's Brave New Films project. Check them out!
Bollier's book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, traces the untold history of how software programmers, legal scholars, activists, artists, musicians and many others built their own communities online and pioneered an ethic of legal sharing. Among the stories it focuses on are the legendary hacker Richard Stallman and the rise of free software; Professor Lawrence Lessig and the invention of the Creative Commons licenses; and the rise of the open educational resources movement, open science and open business models.
Unlike a resource that is bought and sold in the market, or managed by a government agency on behalf of the public, a commons is a new way of creating valuable stuff online. It relies upon people's personal passions, their social relationships among each other, and their shared ideals -- whether rare butterflies, Star Wars movies, or the frontiers of chemistry.
To ensure that an online archive, collaborative website or database will remain accessible to everyone, and not be "taken private" or commercialized, the commoners often use Creative Commons licenses. These free, public licenses assure that a work can be legally shared with others in perpetuity.
The emergence of the commons as a new vehicle for creating valuable stuff has a lot to do with what Bollier calls "The Great Value Shift." Because it is now so easy and cheap for individuals to come together on the Internet to collaborate, online communities are engines for creating new species of wealth. Instead of wealth being something that is necessarily private and saleable in the marketplace, online wealth is often a shared social resource -- something that is accessible to everyone, collectively managed and not saleable for money.
The Great Value Shift helps explain why the blogosphere, news aggregators like The Huffington Post and the free classified-ad website Craigslist are out-competing daily newspapers. They are able to operate more efficiently than businesses that produce physical copies of newspapers every day. This is happening across many creative sectors in the economy -- publishing, music, journalism, video.
While The Great Value Shift has some alarming implications for the future of commercially supported journalism, the economic reality of The Great Value Shift is not going to go away any time soon. Which is why journalism is likely to morph into a very different sort of cultural genre in the coming years.
For more, you can visit the website for Viral Spiral , David Bollier’s personal website or the blog that he edits, Onthecommons.org.
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