A Social Web Without Boundaries

Joe Ito and Larry Lessig both feel that the next innovation explosion will come from a new Hybrid Economy. There is huge potential for social and economic wealth to compliment our commercial society which is still largely untapped.

In the "Read Only Economy", there is efficient technology for people to buy and consume culture created elsewhere (iTunes is a perfect example). We are constantly increasing the capacity and market of culture and content, and by doing so produce more niches by buying even more culture, which produces an efficient market. The result is not only the capacity to generate revenue, but there is also more control about how producers allow people to use the culture (again, iTunes on iPods). Increased control over how people use and consume culture defines the Read Only Internet.

In the "Read Write Economy", those who generate content want you to consume it, but they are also interested in creating. Digital technology has created a Read Write culture of remixing the content to produce something different and perhaps more powerful. Tools of creativity make them tools of speech and expression in today's society. These tools and creative content are part of the vast Creative Commons (which I will talk about in another post).

"Free" is a technique - the argument being that in many situations volunteers do not exist. Larry Lessig uses the example of Wal-Mart, since nobody volunteers to work at Wal-Mart. The store exists in the commercial economy of its market. But Read Write is not the commercial economy. In the Read Write economy, thousands of volunteers do endless work for free. It may be a passion, it may be as a service - it is unclear why people really do it. But what IS clear is that if you introduced the norms of the commercial market into the Read Write market, you would get less, not more work out of the volunteers. The logic of the community prevails, not the marketplace. We know that in a share community, there is tremendous opportunity.

If one considers both the commerce and sharing economies working together, we can think of it as a Hybrid. We can figure out a way to build a volunteer community project that is part commerce and part sharing. Joe Ito (President of Creative Commons) describes it as a way for both the free and commercial aspects of the community to work together, allowing users to remix and reuse commercial content. As costs of production go down radically, he feels that commercial content costs will go down and willingness to share resources increases. In a Hybrid Economy, there will be smaller pieces of the pie, but the pie will be bigger.

Increasingly, defining a Hybrid Community holds the biggest potential for growth in a network environment.

If you have a firm or enterprise with a problem, you can add more human minds to attack as the problem scales. In the same way you would get new servers to scale a physical system overload, our goal should be to subvert the crowds of innovative thinkers to improve the security and capabilities of internet applications. We need to give people the freedom to create and maintain a Digital Democracy. With mutual respect and the balance of both DRM (Digital Rights Management) and freedom which allows groups to maintain neutrality, these ethics might promote both a continued cascade of generativity, which Jonathan Zittrain refers to as a "collective hallucination that assumes people are reasonable and nice" while at the same time promoting the Hybrid Economy that he feels is critical to our future.

Over the past year we've seen a huge uptick in the infrastructure, development tools, and projects designed to build the social web. Perhaps with the help of that infrastructure, we will work on a collaborative basis (both in terms of our local communities and on a global basis) to develop frameworks that will keep people focused on the greater good.

Micah Sifry has pondered whether the Internet is fracturing or uniting us. His conclusion is that with recent tools that facilitate collaboration across boundaries, we have changed the world. Until recently, only the elites talked to the elites. Now the world is opening up and there is transparency and ongoing discussion between the elites and new voices.

Perhaps we can eliminate disregard for nameless others that we may or may not ever meet by being sure we are connected. A social web without boundaries will increasingly make us think as a world brain. Social connection can hinder many bad things that happen in the world. Perhaps, with that connection, we can encourage the wisdom of the crowds toward positive goals, including a productive Hybrid Economy.