Micro politics and Assumed Values

This week’s theme was the shifting micro-political structures enabled by the Internet and the way these are changing our social assemblages. I found Rhinegold’s TED talk (2008) particularly useful in laying the historical foundations of for our current predicament – just as the printing press enabled mass literacy and thus new collective arrangements, the Internet and mobile devices are created a mass computer literacy that greatly expands our network for communication and action. From here, most of the readings seemed to agreed that these collective arrangements form a basis for our social understanding and the values that are intrinsic to our daily life.

However, I found the assumed commonality between cultures to be somewhat problematic in its discussion. Bauwens (2014) in particular advocated societies need to move away from our capitalist collective arrangement and toward ‘communal values’ that emphasis intellectual peer-to-peer freedom. While the sentiment is clear (that is to say he is arguing against the increasing authority institutions are exerting over our micro-political interactions i.e Facebook) I think the notion of the communal is still largely an anglo-centric ideology that seeks to impart our agreed values on a global scale. This is something that the Internet has been an incredible tool in facilitating and to some extent his comments are symptomatic of that.

In having a global network of literacy and constant accessibility, the agreed values of the Western world tend to become the dominant frameworks for collective action. While we are now able to connect with groups that have similar ideologies and form new ‘alliances’ that have shared values, resoundingly it is still the capitalist democracies voice who is the loudest and who has the greatest influence over our communal interactions. This is becoming increasingly apparent in Facebook’s privacy policies and integration to multiple media platform. What was originally anticipated as a peer-to-peer network for the exchange of information and intellectual ideas has now become a mass marketing network that has a greater agency over its users image then they do. As technology continues to become more powerful and more mobile, this trend may be exacerbated to the point of intellectual repression or completely eradicated by different micro-political frameworks – the volatile nature of the Internet makes it difficult to predict. We can however, comment on the current trend toward a capitalist Internet culture that has shifted from its peer-to-peer roots to become a radically different technology all together.

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> DATE ACCESSED: 5/5/14