Saturday, April 30, 2011

Blog 11: Another blog

A sharing economy is an economy where people come to interact and exchange ideas and work. No one is there to make money but instead are all there by choice. I would consider internet communities like reddit sharing communities. People gather here to talk with other people and to amuse themselves. They are not actively trying to make money. In fact in many communities like this people who post links to their own sites are shunned as it is seen as shameless self promotion and an attempt to make money where money should not be a factor.
A commercial economy is one like the one we live in every day. We pay for what we want and get paid for performing some needed task. A very few of us are fortunate enough to get paid for doing what we love but not very many. Everything in a commercial economy has a price. Generally its price is in some way connected to is scarcity. For this reason commercial economies sometimes struggle in the digital world where no object is truly scarce. However there is money to be made or there would be no internet.
Lessig’s greater argument is that copywrite is not serving the purpose that it was originally intended for. It no longer inspires creativity and in fact actively stifles it. He mentions both commercial and sharing economies because they are going to both have a difficult time as the world becomes more digital. Commercial economies are going to lose some of their steam as possession becomes more and more digital. Let put it like this. If my apartment were burning down right now I would get my cats and my computer and gtfo. Everything thing else I own can be replaced and mostly just sits around taking up space. There are a couple of items that are of sentimental value to me that I would want to have to pass along to my kids or others but these were all given to me. The things that are important to me are not as commercial as they would have been to someone30 years ago in my same place.
The flip side of the coin is that the newness of the internet is wearing off. People are smart and love nothing so much as money. Because of this people will always find a way to make money off of something. I talked about reddit earlier as a sharing economy. Lets revisit that now. Reddit is an internet link aggregation site with the ability to vote links up or down. There is a dark underside to reddit though. The use of voting blocks to send a topic to the first page for a company in return for monetary rewards is quite common. Basically a large number of people with multiple accounts get together and try to get comments to the front page. This is the cancer that killed digg.com a site that started out a lot like reddit. Reddit has taken steps to ensure that this dosent happened but I am sure people still find a way.
The end result is that both of these economies are going to have to come together to form the hybrid economies that lessig talks about or face eventual obliteration.

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