This week a focus was placed on the way in which new media has allowed everyday people to form new kinds of communities and take things into their own hands. It is here we see a sense of disintermediation, where the normal, traditional mediation through external bodies has been taken out of the equation, and we now simply contact one and other. It is through this disintermediation that we see a drastic change to our traditional value system, as people who once placed trust into higher institutions, now declare they rather trust “people like themselves” (Bauwens, 2014). What we are now experiencing is new aspects of ‘openness’ (participation, transparency, shareability and access) from all areas, including software, to design, education, science, food, currency and so forth.  In fact it was just this morning that I stopped at my local coffee shop on my way to university that I noticed a flyer on the counter which read:

“Need a car? Borrow your neighbours’ from $5 an hour or $25 a day?”

“Got a car? Share your car at times you don’t need it and earn $2-10K a year”

It is this service idea, ‘Car Next Door – Neighbour-to- Neighbour Car Sharing’, that exemplifies this disintermediation and transfer of trust from higher institutions to fellow members of society. It is this idea of peer to peer (P2P) sharing, that sees everyday people using media and communications to take things into their own hands. It is P2P sharing that has completely rewritten the traditional and basic models of how society works, emphasising cooperation rather than (or with) competition. It is this traditional approach of “defeating, destroying and denominating competition” (Rheingold, 2008) that has been replaced with a “step back” from competition, and and step towards inclusion and cooperation.

So what does this mean for our modern society?

As highlighted by Bauwens (2014), our current political economy “is based on a false notion of material abundance; on the other hand, it believes that intellectual, scientific and technical exchange should be subject to strong proprietary constraints, and subjects innovation to internet restrictions”. What we are experiencing is peer based communities sharing varied information and knowledge for the common good of our society, “as communities do not have vested interests in artificial scarcity”, therefore reorganising and establishing a smarter world, and hopefully a smarter future (Bauwens, 2014).

 

References:

Bauwens, Michel (2014) ’Openness, a necessary revolution into a smarter world’, P2P Foundation, February 4, <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/what-is-p2p-an-introduction/2014/02/04&gt;

 

Rheingold, Howard (2008) ’Way-new collaboration’, YouTube.com (TED), http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=d5s3Z0iesRM