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inevitable for what the internet can do. We could also note that the human capacity
for greed is also well documented in ancient texts.
In a 2012 essay about online social networks, Daniel Miller argues that networks
such as Facebook offer the possibility of communities which offer 'something much
closer to older traditions of anthropological study of social relations such as kinship
studies' (Miller
2012
: 147). Facebook itself has many dubious qualities and is not
the best expression of online-social-networking potential, but nevertheless, you can
see his point:
Instead of focusing on [social networking sites] as the vanguard of the new, and the rapidity
of its global reach [− or on the idea that they represent a trend towards individualism -] it
may well be that [social networking sites] are so quickly accepted in places such as
Indonesia and Turkey because their main impact is to redress some of the isolating and
individualizing impacts of other new technologies and allow people to return to certain
kinds of intense and interwoven forms of social relationship that they otherwise feared were
being lost. (Miller
2012
: 148)
The internet certainly offers the possibility of building social connections, with
or without Facebook, and importantly enables people to share ideas through these
networks. There is a popular idea of the internet as a platform for an open, sharing
culture, where ideas are made available for others to build upon. Over time, of
course, some aspects of this open sharing have been closed down and/or replaced by
more modern systems aligned with today's conventional ideas of intellectual prop-
erty, copyright, and ownership. Nevertheless - or perhaps
because
of this - there
remains a strong interest in the idea of the commons, a shared space where things
are made available for use by others, of which Wikipedia is a strong and popular
example. The Creative Commons licensing system offers creators the opportunity
to make their work available with specifi c prescriptions, for example, that the cre-
ator should be credited. The 'commons' model connects - indeed, is based upon -
ancient notions of communal public space, although the self-serving regimes of the
rich and powerful, as well as the casual selfi shness of individuals, have historically
meant that a thriving commons is diffi cult to sustain (Hardin
1968
). A digital com-
mons is different, of course, as digital resources can be copied and used without
depleting and damaging the stock available to everyone else.
The commons is about having free access to resources, so that people can share
and build together. This is a valuable dimension of culture. It does not necessarily
follow, however, that everything online must be free. In everyday life, we are able to
comprehend a library and a bookshop, side by side, without thinking that one can-
cels out the other, and it is unfair to assume that only the malign or greedy would
seek to charge money for things online. For example, Jaron Lanier offers a sensible
defence of the right of an artist to make a living by selling their work directly online
(
2010
,
2013
). The kind of transaction that Lanier suggests is more like an ancient
market, or bazaar, where the producers of diverse goods sell them directly to
people - presenting and selling them across their own stall. This kind of trade is
much more convivial, and good for the producer, than the twentieth century idea
that we should be able to get everything via one 'supermarket'.
