When disaffection on political parties and politicians is pervasive, most argue whether it could be possible, thanks to the Internet – and Information and Communication Technologies in general – forget the mainstream political system and let the citizenry express their own opinion, debate in virtual agorae and vote their representatives and policy choices directly. In other words, the claim is whether the actual intermediaries can be replaced by citizen networks or, in the limit, just be overridden.
Our aim in the following lines is to (1) explain that some dire (socioeconomic) changes are actually taking place,(2) why these socioeconomic changes are taking place and (3) infer, from this, what conditions shall take place in the future for (4) another wave of changes to happen that could eventually a much acclaimed new (e-)democracy. In a last section, we will discuss that despite lack of data, the trend seems to be just in the direction of the impoverishment of democracy, partly due to the weakening of political institutions.
Isaac Mao: Sharism, Philosophy and New Economic Models
Sharing is a commonly spread way of behaving amongst human beings. Most of the time you are willing to share an apple with your peers, while just sometimes you decide that you won’t: if “sharing” means “giving”, will you always want to give away your property, your possibility to use something?
But on the Internet, there is not such a restriction. The web should not be a “read-only” web, but a “read-and-write” web. Blogging allowed just that. And the more you read blogs, the more prone you are to also write one.
On the Internet you share pieces of information, memes. Linking memes and behaviours can bring a new force up leading to changes. And there are plenty of examples of the power of change of meme sharing.
We should be able to connect the world of memes and atoms, to build up a coherence of atom sharing and meme sharing.
Public bike sharing or (private) car sharing just go on this line of thought.
What will you gain from your sharing?
Identity. Digital identity or identity online is crucial.
Social capital, accumulating around your digital persona.
Credit recording.
Trackback on the Path of Value Adding (PVA)
Sharing is fostered when everybody shares, then one becoming part of a sharing network that acts like a brain and its brain of neurons.
And there are ways to monetize the free circulation of shared information and knowledge.
Sharism = connected + shareable + path. Technically, we and them will be connected; mentally we need more preemptive to feed the world relevant information; if we can economically prove that ‘the more we share, the more we gain’, then the problem is solved.
A share: a new measurement, currency that you can use to capitalize what you bring to your social network.
Debate/Interview
Teresa Turiera: should we foster Sharism with tax cuts to “sharistic” enterprises or similar policies? Mao: Your organization has to be reinvented. Sharism is not about setting up new marketing strategies for social media, but yet another completely different thing. And the human resources cycle should definitely be a part of this new managerial design.
Lluís Pastor (after Twitter): is the way Al-Jazeera uses social media a good practice of Sharism? Mao: definitely. During 2010, their streaming audience multiplied by 20. Social media and content sharing from the grassroots has changed the landscape of news today.
Teresa Turiera: how will the future of activism and revolutions be altered by Sharism? Mao: Social media interconnects people one with each other in unprecedented ways, both horizontally (with your peers) and vertically (across the different strata and structures of society). ‘Signals’ from the grassroots will be increasingly embedded in the political discourse and loop back to the decision-makers.
Lluís Pastor (after Twitter): how can Sharism strengthen entrepreneurs? Mao: A first step is to scale up the idea of Sharism, as it requires a much wider adoption for it to work properly.
Round Table
After de the debate/interview, a round table followed that I chaired and that was participated also by Isaac Mao himself, Ricardo Galli, founder of the “Spanish Digg” (Menéame), and Alfons Sort, CEO of Adobe Systems Ibérica.
In general, the round table gave Isaac Mao another chance to sort out his thoughts, especially in what concerned how to apply Sharism to the world of economics. If I am right, they can be summarized as follows:
For Sharism to work and be economically viable, first of all a critical mass of adopters has to be achieved.
The new currency in a sharism-based system is reputation. This works both for individuals and institutions.
The way this reputation/currency is managed is through a ‘sharebank‘, which acts much like a legal tender bank, but deals with reputations.
As the transition to Sharism implies a radical change, there is a need to design a path to build that transition. That path has to be designed ex-ante.
In Sharism, identity is the key, as reputation strongly lies or depends on it.
The most interesting part to me during the round table was the debate, initiated by Ricardo Galli, whether Sharism was really an alternative to Capitalism or just a change of currency, where legal tender was replaced by reputation, but everything else remained the same.
Personal reflections
As I spoke out during my concluding remarks at the round table, I have never been so much in line with a speaker and, at the very same time, so clueless on how to get to the points he was making. That is, I share the philosophy, but I neither share not even foresee how to make it happen.
Indeed, I was especially surprised to hear Isaac Mao speak about topics that have already been covered by other disciplines and not mentioning them or even tacitly linking to them.
First, the reputation-based economy he’s been talking about has already been much discussed around the general field of the gift economy. Some practices in free software or open content can be explained by it, while some others cannot. And the problems in a gift economy are many and many are unsolved yet.
Second, and related to the former, most of the transition from a capitalist economy towards a sharism economy can be explained by the hacker ethic. Again, a lot has been written — with this name or another one — about the topic and how the Information Society is requiring a change of mindset in relationship with the Industrial Society. The problem, again, is how to deal with transitions, not only in matters of time, but in differnt paradigm economies that are being forced to live together for long periods of time.
Third, I really missed a mention to time banks, cooperatives or virtual currencies (e.g. Bitcoin). Plenty of people have and are experimenting with other ways to organize themselves, assess and value time and commodities and provide alternative societies.
In my opinion, sharism needs some polishing, and not only before it can be applied, but also for being discussed as an intellectual exercise.
Further reading
Official website for Sharism, including a wiki depicting most terms.
The key motivator of Social Media and the core spirit of Web 2.0 is a mind switch called Sharism. Sharism suggests a re-orientation of personal values. […] And it’s okay to seek financial rewards. But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.
This is Isaac Mao in the essay Sharism: A Mind Revolution that he wrote for Joi Ito’s book Freesouls. While I like the music — I actually hum it myself every now an then — I find the lyrics hard to sing.
Don’t get me wrong: there are almost 2,000 of pieces of work that I am already sharing in this website, ranging from the simplest blog post to the latest version of a learning material, and including slides for presentations, articles, book chapters and so. Everything is (at this very moment) under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license, which has not stopped third parties from asking for permission to create derivative works, which has always been granted too.
The reasons for behaving like that are the ones that Isaac Mao is depicting in his essay, and many more, including both my own philosophy regarding the nature of the outputs derived from public funding or the ethos of scientists and their role in society. But this behaviour, while fostered by ideologies, is actually been made possible because my time is already paid: partly by tax payers, partly by students enrolled in my (public) university (tax payers too, after all).
When I wake up in the morning, my mortgage is already being paid. With that in mind, I have plenty of room for putting ideologies into practice.
Isaac Mao speaks about the positive results of Sharism:
You get comments and feedback in general that enrich your work.
You get access to all the other stuff being shared.
Anything you share can be forwarded, circulated and republished, which implies you get recognition and (namely) social status.
What you do, if shared, has a meaning not only for you, but for the whole of society.
But you will in every case get something just as substantial: Happiness.
This works 100% for me. As a scholar, a (mostly) publicly-funded scholar, this works 100%, especially the happiness part. I mean it. Since I began to blog in 2003, I only got benefits from sharing. Sometimes even in cash.
But.
I’ve done my homework (see below). I’ve read what I ought to. And still can’t I see how Sharism — or, closely related, a hacker ethic — can be applicable to the whole economy the way Mao’s portraying. Yes, we’ve got (some) examples in the free software community and (much less) examples in the open/free culture movement. But still, in a global economy where money comes from capturing the added value of an output (where “capturing” is a very broad term for a very complex set of practices, most of them related to restrained access to that output), Sharism will have hard times when it comes to paying a mortgage, which is paid in actual legal tender.
I will definitely bring all my questions on the table with the goal in mind to see whether we can shed some light on the many open topics that, in my opinion, Sharism still has to clarify.
Recommended readings
I previously said that I had done my homework. What follows is a brief collection of readings which I find very relevant for our discussion here. Enjoy.
On April 12th, 2011, I was in Belgrade take part in the Quality standards in ICT education workshop, belonging to the Click to Europe, aimed at promoting and contributing to e-inclusion of people, businesses and communities in Serbia, thus improving quality of life, employability and social inclusion of citizens.
Knowing myself very little about quality standards, I was asked to provide the participants — mainly telecentre administrators and other related profiles — with a general framework where they could situate their own e-inclusion projects and, most especially, what was the importance and role of ICT skills in the whole scenario.
Keeping that in mind, and for something more than three hours, I began explaining what the digital revolution was about, that is, what was the outer framework, and went on zeroing in until I ended up talking about digital competence, e-portfolios and personal learning environments. The underlying idea — which almost became a mantra — was that it was not about e-inclusion, but about inclusion, inclusion in an always changing world that required the most valuable skill: being able to learn, to take control of one’s own learning process. And digital skills were there to help people in that.
The speech, Citizens in a Knowledge Society: rethinking education from scratch was structured as follows:
In The digital revolution: citizenship and inclusion in a post-industrial society I explained how digitization implied the shift from an industrial to an informational, knowledge-based, network society, and how in such a society institutions (and intermediators in general) have seen their roles and sheer nature radically transformed.
Policies for (e-)inclusion: from physical access to meaningful use depicted a comprehensive model of the digital economy and how each and every category of digital development was strongly related with other ones or with some indicators we generally use to measure development.
In Netizens: towards a set of digital competences I tried to exemplify how ICTs have become general purpose technologies and are now embedded in the core of our daily lives. Thus, e-inclusion is definitely about inclusion in a very much broader sense.
Lastly, New assessment frameworks for new skills provided a comprehensive definition of digital skills which I related, again, with daily experiences and, most especially, with the new ways of learning that Information and Communication Technologies have enabled.
The workshop provided me with two positive feelings.
The first one is that I got the sensation that there was an overall coherence and consistence in the work that I have been pursuing in the last years (I revisited and reused material of my own from, at least, the last four years). Thus, realizing that somehow you’ve been adding up or building around a core idea (and not just producing splattered thoughts) is pleasantly comforting.
The second one is that, at least, most of the theory I handle (of my own and, most of it, by third parties) seems to be having strong strings attached to reality and being ready to provide advice for policy making and project designing. The more feedback I get from people from the terrain, the more I think we’re going parallel (or converging) paths, which, again, is absolutely a good thing to be aware of.
I was invited to present a keynote during the VII General Assembly of the Spanish Red Cross, on 26 March 2011. I was asked to talk about what should nonprofits do in view of the proliferation of social networking sites, online participation, cyber-activism and so.
In such cases, I generally try to avoid the usual showcase of “best practices” and go instead to what causes made possible those “best practices”. It’s a tougher option, as it often implies a trade-off from the “wow factor” towards the “what-is-this-guy-talking-about factor”. On the positive side, I pursue the trade-off from the “let’s-copy-these-actions” towards “I-know-why-they-worked-and-I-understand-how-to-design-them-myself”.
On the other hand, the representatives of the Spanish Red Cross were choosing their President and the members of the boards of directors of different regional levels. That was a very strong reason to shift towards more strategic issues instead of strictly practical and punctual applications of social media and nonprofit technology.
Thus, the structure of my presentation was explaining:
What caused the transition from an Industrial Society to an Information Society;
how people were leveraging their access to information and communication technologies for activism and self-organization;
what was being the impact like for institutions, especially those that represented people’s interests: governments, political parties and non-governmental organizations.
In a nutshell, the main message was that the Internet, cellphones, social networking sites, etc. are not a matter of how you inform your stakeholders, how you communicate with your volunteers or how you convince your donors, but a dire change of the game-board that requires serious strategic reflections and decisions in the very short term. Evidence shows that many institutions will either go through a deep process of transformation or will simply disappear, and NGOs are included in the set.
I have been invited to participate in the II Jornades d’Aprenentatge de Llengües: Entorns, Eines i Recursos Didàctics (II Conference on Language Teaching: Environments, Tools and Learning Resources). I was asked to explain (a) how my own Personal Learning Environment (PLE) was created and managed and (b) how could PLEs help in bridging formal and informal education or how could they bridge the institutional with the personal.
The story begins in 2001, when I began working in the department of development cooperation in my university, developing ICT4D projects based on e-learning for development, online volunteering, free software and open content… when very few people spoke about that and in these terms.
The need to learn led me to explore outside of my closest environment, read blogs (which were then the most up-to-date resource available) and, finally, start my own blog in 2003. Then it came the wiki, then the bibliographic manager, then I turned a PhD student and I finally became a lecturer at university, where I try to apply the way I learnt to learn to the way I teach and help others to learn.
Takeaways:
Read a lot. If you’re a knowledge worker, you have to read. If you don’t, the problem is not that the PLE is time-demanding: the problem is that you’re not doing your work.
Read thoroughly: analysis, synthesis, abstraction are a requisite for juicing a reading. Quite often reading requires writing to fix the main ideas and your own reflections triggered by them.
The best way to learn is to teach something. Writing (a blog) is partly about this: you are writing for the future you that will be reading your own words later on.
A PLE is not built out of the blue: do it little by little, device after device. You’d rarely use an all-tools PLE, as you’ll rarely get a definitive one.
Building a PLE should be done according to the needs it will cover. A PLE should be working for you, not the other way round.
Your digital identity is very important and it will become more important with time. Be proactive in building it. And your own domain is a good place to start with.
Your portfolio speaks about you better than your words. And it does it 24×7. It is very likely that, for most knowledge-based jobs, your e-portfolio will be worth much more than your resume.
Your network of people is as important as the objects you surround yourself with. Birds of the same feathers flock together: your network is your flesh & bones e-portfolio.
In a digital world, everything is connected.
Thus, inside/outside is a false dichotomy, artificially created to raise walls were there were none. Ask yourself why someone would try and build such walls.
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