Internet Evaluation: Tragedy of the Commons

Was anyone else surprised by this article? I'm not oblivious to the diversity of opinion on population, nor do I think Hardin is totally off-based, but couldn't he have left a little room for religious ideology as a possible exception to the rule. His "Puritan inheritance," as he states, is almost used as a derogative. My religious background commends Hardin’s uses of mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected (Hardin), but still leaving room for Deity to finalize our decisions, which is where I think we would find our impeding barrier of disagreement. With this theory of the commons with regards to the Internet I can see great correlation to his take on population with this. If Hardin and I were to tackle the Internet as the source of our problem I think we would have been much better friends.

Apart from outer space, the Internet is the most expansive interval I can appeal to. Anyone can access it as if it were as common as the air we breathe. Ok, a little farfetched, but you get the point. So, where there is accessibility to such an extensive resource freedom of thought or expression races hysterically through digital highways reaching from the largest cities to the islands of the sea to young and old alike. So, how does this impact us? Well…that depends! I’m not going to go into a lot of detail how the free flow of thought through the Internet impacts us, but needless to say there are a lot of creepy people out there that take no thought of (Hardin would say they have no conscience) how their content will impact their neighbor.

Hardin mentions in a still more embryonic state is our recognition of the evils of the commons in matters of pleasure (Hardin). The Internet is full of “pleasurable” things, which I will not go into. And yes, I’m using the word pleasurable as a self indulging derogative. Who is there to regulate this? Sure there have been steps to do so such as governing laws, firewalls, encryption, and penalties to keep us away, but the problem is people are finding loops, so it’s not really regulated enough to make much of an impact. In other words to answer Kathy’s questions as to how I rate edemocracy, well I rate it very poorly for the reasons just mentioned. The only way to beat it is to strengthen our moral ethics, but I’ll save this argument for another day. I will conclude; however, with my own declaration that there is truth out there without taking away our right to think, so ponder as Hardin quotes Hegel who said “Freedom is recognition of necessity.”

Source:

"The Tragedy of the Commons" by Garret Hardin from Science Magazine (1968)

Somewhere in Space...

The World is Flat....

I’m not sure what to think of Friedman’s metaphorical usage of breaking down the wall. It seems pretty obvious to me that by breaking down barriers, in this case of open source information, we relinquish power to express ideas freely, communicate more fluidly, and innovate for the future. Unless we’re talking about the implications on social sciences, then all I can say to Friedman is “duh!”
Before anyone thinks I’m totally out of tune and not looking at the big picture let me just add that I see what he means when he tells me that the world is flatter as the world becomes more connected to each other. I’ve heard this analogy before in conversation with friends, but using different terminology. Have you ever heard anyone say the world is smaller or it’s not at big as you thought? Of course you have, and Friedman uses his own prose to systematically map out the evolution of the latter part of the information age using political metaphor and economic evidence to make his point.
However, from a historical point of view the events that transpired that brought about Windows 3.0 or even Windows 95, Netscape, fiber optic wiring, and so forth have huge implications at the speed by which these entities contributed to “flattening” the world. For example, Friedman quotes John Doerr of Netscape, “The Netscape IPO was a clarion call to the world to wake up the Internet." Until then, it had been the province of the early adopters and geeks (Friedman, 61). I can’t imagine many people would argue that the outsourcing of the Internet to the public via Netscape was the most evocative affair of our time. Everyone and I mean everyone was able to access the Internet at their leisure. Many thought that it would take some time for people to embrace the Internet, but that wasn’t the case. If people find a significant enough need for something they won’t mind the learning curve to incorporate it into their own cultural sphere.
So here we are in the now. We have free exercise of Internet uploading and downloading, e-commerce, e-mail, webcams, e-learning, and others so that we are pressing forward to either our demise or our eventual dominance in a Utopian world. Time will tell!