The Digital Commons(Not Yet) A Tragedy

Andrea Rehn

@profrehnDir of Whittier’s Digital Liberal Arts Program

But first, some

baby sheep

Before the Enclosure

Movement, sheep roamed

freely in shared spaces, the

commons.

Before the Enclosure

Movement, sheep roamed

freely in shared spaces, the

commons.

I’m

Freeeeee!

But then, the commons were privatized and enclosed--by law.

“The increase of pasture by which your sheep, which

are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be

said now to devour men and unpeople, not only

villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the

sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than

ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those

holy men... stop the course of agriculture, destroying

houses and towns – reserving only the churches –

and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep

in them.”

Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

Will we allow the Enclosure

of the

Digital Commons?

What are “digital commons?”

Are the internet and the world wide web the same thing?

Who owns the internet? The Web?

Where is the internet? The Web?

How do companies make money on the Web?

What does government have to do with the Web?

What does the Web mean for individual identity?

Brief History of the Network

1969: ARPAnet

1983: TCP/IP makes WWW possible

1984: Apple MacIntosh launched (personal computing)

1990: HTML & URL invented by Tim Berners-Lee (and

others)

1998: Google founded

2003: Total Information Awareness

2013: Aaaron Swartz, Edward Snowden & Wikileaks

What are these things?Internet:

Web Server:

Website:

Domain Name:

Browser:

World-Wide Web:

Web 2.0:

Internet: Cables that connect computers via a Network (the roads & highways)

Web Server: Computer connected to Internet that stores and shares information

Website (Domain): Location on a Server (your house)

Domain Names: Address of a website (your street address)

Browser: Reads code of website and displays as words, graphics, videos, etc.

(GUI)

World-Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee): Open Source information space navigated

via the Internet using URLs and hyperlinks

Web 2.0: GUI sites emphasizing user-generated content and interconnectivity

What is COMMON in the Digital commons?

The Role of

Government

1969-1980s: ARPAnet

1996: Telecommunications

Act

2003: Total Information

Awareness

2013: WikiLeaks, etc.

2014: Net Neutrality

A Declaration of the Independence of

Cyberspace

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

The role of commerce

“In the first quarter of 2015 Google took in $17.3 billion in revenue, up

12% year over year. Nearly all of it -- $15.5 billion -- came from

advertising sales.”

The Motley Fool

Why do NETWORKS matter?

The Machine is Us(ing) Us

by

Michael Wesch

https://youtu.be/NLlGopyXT_g

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/

What Does Web 2.0 Change?

Participatory Culture

Privacy/Security and the Commons

Wikipedia, Crowd-sourcing, and Paywalls

Open Source, Open Access Movement

Identity and Community

Attention, Human Connection, Our Brains

Trolling, Doxxing, Commenting

Internet Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Real

Names

Youtube, Uber, & Monetizing the “Sharing

Economy”

Creative Commons and Copyright

https://whittier.domains: Own Your Data, Own Your Domain

A Vision of Students Today

by

Michael Wesch

https://youtu.be/dGCJ46vyR9o

Quinn Norton Thursday 4:30pm

Aaron Swartz, founder of Reddit