PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Call of the crowd

• Tribal values: a sense of belonging to an online tribe - a community of people

united by common values and interests

The ‘saving power’ of social media

The more we spend our lives online, and our

products and appliances communicate online,

the more the 'real' world is duplicated as data

• Social media sites are data-harvesting

engines; prosumers are data-resource

• Heidegger: ‘Where the danger is, there

lies the saving power also’

• Social media creates prosumers. It

thereby fosters a social culture based in:

• Sharing

• Trust

• Reciprocity

The rise of collaborative consumption

2010: TIME Magazine names

collaborative consumption as an

idea that will change the world

• Sharing promoted by

sustainability movement

• Facilitated by internet

• Boosted by financial crisis

‘Collaborative

consumption started

online - by posting

comments and sharing

files, code, photos, videos,

and knowledge. And now

we have reached a

powerful inflection point,

where we are starting to

apply the same

collaborative principles

and sharing behaviours to

other physical areas of our

everyday lives’.

What is collaborative consumption?

‘[A]n emerging socioeconomic groundswell: the old stigmatized C’s associated with

coming together and “sharing” – cooperatives, collectives, and communes – are being

refreshed and reinvented… We call this groundswell Collaborative Consumption’.

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise

of Collaborative Consumption (2010)

What is collaborative consumption?

What is collaborative consumption?

Botsman and Rogers distinguish three kinds of collaborative consumption service:

1. Product service systems

2. Redistribution markets

3. Collaborative lifestyles

Rise of collaborative consumption

• 2008 financial crisis: a catalytic moment for collaborative consumption.

• Brian Chesky (CEO of AirBnB):

‘People realized that they are not defined by the things they own, they are defined by

the experiences they have’

• Social experiences are the intrinsic goods at the heart of the sharing economy

The joy of the gift

• Gifters earn reputation and prestige for gifts

• Recipients feel indebted to gifters. Mauss argues that the gift creates a ‘feeling

bond’ that unites parties in a tribe

• Reputation, prestige, and social solidarity: the intrinsic goods of gift economies

The rise of reputation systems

The rise of reputation systems

TrustCloud: real time reputation metrics

• Gathers information from numerous social media services and algorithmically

determines your reputation based on the nature and frequency of contributions.

TrustCloud: real time reputation metrics

• Gathers information from numerous social media services and algorithmically

determines your reputation based on the nature and frequency of contributions.

Connect.me: P2P reputation

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL MEDIA

The rise of collaborative consumption

Build a reputation through virtuous gifts

• Gift-giving should be empowering

• If it depletes you, you are doing it wrong

Nietzsche and the gift-giving virtue

• Friedrich Nietzsche (1988-1900)

• Gift Giving Virtue (Thus Spoke

Zarathustra): ‘health’ = abundant creativity

• Abundance from Latin ab-unda, meaning

the wave that overflows

• ‘Bless the cup that wants to overflow…’

• Abundant heart ‘surges broad and full like a river’

Nietzsche and the gift-giving virtue

• ‘My city is great!’; ‘My house has this

extra room’; ‘I’m not using my car,

would anyone like to hire it?’

Foucault and the art of life

• Anti-naturalism: the self is not given, it is made and remade

• The ‘art of life’ of ancient Greece and Rome

Foucault and the art of life

We need an ‘art of life’ for the age of social media

• Nomadism - agility, curiosity, inquisitiveness

• Communalism - care, generosity, mutualism

• Mindfulness - presence, integrity, authenticity.

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL MEDIA