Blog #11

The basic distinction I found between the sharing and commercial economy was the use of money in social transactions. Lessig tells us that in a commercial economy people expect to have some exchange of money, as he says, it would be weird if there wasn't. A sharing economy revolves around a certain relationship we have with the individual we deal with; a friend, a lover, a neighbor, are the examples Lessig uses, where money would bring awkwardness into the relationship. The example he discussed of the young man in the plane was very interesting, where a sharing economy can be created between two individuals who don't necessarily have any connections; the young man did not rip DVDs to sell them, rent them, or make any kind of money off of them; he rips them for himself and does not expect money to share them.

The examples Lessig uses were very helpful in making me understand the different ways in which commercial and sharing economies could appear. The small differences between commercial economies Amazon, Netflix, and Google, and the different expectations we have from each website; and the wide range of sharing websites that have appeared on the NET.

Lessig spends a few pages discussing Wikipedia, its creation, and its popularity. I enjoyed his question of "why do people contribute to this community with no compensation for their time?"; the answer being that people share their knowledge, they do so to better the community they are a part of and in exchange will gain knowledge from some other volunteer. His distinction between "me-regarding" and "thee-regarding" sharing economies is important as well; some of the interactions we have are for our own betterment, but in some cases we choose to do things to help out others rather than ourselves.

Much like the Read/Only and Read/Write Communities he discussed earlier in his book, Lessig insists on the fact that the commercial and sharing economies are not to be taken out of context, studied all on their own; the two are complementary of each other, both must be taken into account. I believe this is important for his main argument, we must learn to live with both cultures and both economies, we do not have to choose one or the other, but integrate both in the way we live our lives.

Blog #4

One of the first things that caught my attention when reading Weinberger was the quote "every time you organize matters in one way, you are disordering them in others" (88). From past chapters and the What Is Web 2.0 and Web Squared articles we've read it was understood that going beyond first and second order of order allows a digital organization that places items into multiple places, "hang information from as many branches as possible" (Weinberger, 103).

An aspect of the digital world I'm very interested in is the idea of users working together to create a workable place for each and every single person. The use of tags is a life-saver in many situations when searching for a specific website, picture, or book title. In What Is Web 2.0 O'Reilly discusses Wikipedia and Flickr where each user brings in his knowledge and experience so others can reach specific information. Wikipedia and Flickr are discussed in Everything is Miscellaneous as well, all editors in Wikipedia create hyperlinks to other pages creating a web (or tree) within the website. The use of tags in Flickr (and a majority of other sites) allows for individual labeling of information; as a user you look for specific things that will lead you down a path no other user would have followed.

The section "The Rise of Real Time: A Collective Mind" discusses the use of hash tags in Twitter allowing users to follow a specific channel without the distraction of "useless" information. Weinberger talked about hash tags as well when describing the lists that can be created in Delicious. Using hashtags facilitates the finding of information but once again it allows easier sharing between users of the Internet. I suppose O'Reilly and Batelle summarize it quite well in Web Squared when they write "many people now understand this idea in the sense of 'crowdsourcing,' meaning that a large group of people can create a collective work whose value far exceeds that provided by any of the individual participants" (2).