While surfing on Web I encountered interesting video (you can find it here), where Rheingold talks about new technologies and collaboration that they enable. He is presenting some interesting ideas and it is really worth to see it.
Rheingold starts his talk with announcement that we can already see the beginnings of new story, story where cooperation and collective action will play a more important role in society. Through examples he is presenting his ideas about evolution of new media that create new forms of collective action and new forms of wealth.
Today, of course, the enabling technologies are based on the Internet and in the many-to-many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a marketplace. He stresses that new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped to create new economic forms and with examples of open source business he is pointing to a new form of production: peer-to-peer production. He suspects that if new forms of cooperation enabled by new technologies create new forms of wealth, we may be moving into yet another economy form that is significantly different from previous ones; it is based on collaboration. Businesses that are open-sourcing their software and services are not doing this out of altruism, but because they are learning that a certain kind of sharing is in their self-interest (Amazon, EBay, Wikipedia). Instead of “neither of us can trust each other so we have to make suboptimal moves”, it is, “you prove to me that you are trustworthy, and I will cooperate”. For example, BitTorrent turns every downloader into an uploader, making the system more efficient the more it is used. Rheingold says that we don’t know enough, not even about basic principles and he makes an appeal to start to think about them.
Rheingold made an interesting speech, but because of its complexity, I only summarized his main ideas about communication technologies. Although he present new way to think about new technologies, in my opinion his expectations are not completely realistic. I think that cooperation-based economy, although has its own advantages, is not going to be realized so soon. There are many power relations and structures that wouldn’t agree.
Rheingold starts his talk with announcement that we can already see the beginnings of new story, story where cooperation and collective action will play a more important role in society. Through examples he is presenting his ideas about evolution of new media that create new forms of collective action and new forms of wealth.
Today, of course, the enabling technologies are based on the Internet and in the many-to-many era, every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a marketplace. He stresses that new forms of communication and new media in the past have helped to create new economic forms and with examples of open source business he is pointing to a new form of production: peer-to-peer production. He suspects that if new forms of cooperation enabled by new technologies create new forms of wealth, we may be moving into yet another economy form that is significantly different from previous ones; it is based on collaboration. Businesses that are open-sourcing their software and services are not doing this out of altruism, but because they are learning that a certain kind of sharing is in their self-interest (Amazon, EBay, Wikipedia). Instead of “neither of us can trust each other so we have to make suboptimal moves”, it is, “you prove to me that you are trustworthy, and I will cooperate”. For example, BitTorrent turns every downloader into an uploader, making the system more efficient the more it is used. Rheingold says that we don’t know enough, not even about basic principles and he makes an appeal to start to think about them.
Rheingold made an interesting speech, but because of its complexity, I only summarized his main ideas about communication technologies. Although he present new way to think about new technologies, in my opinion his expectations are not completely realistic. I think that cooperation-based economy, although has its own advantages, is not going to be realized so soon. There are many power relations and structures that wouldn’t agree.
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