No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

I.1. Social Dynamics of SharingThe Sharing Turn: Why we are generally nice and have a good chance to cooperate our way out of the mess we have gotten ourselves into Volker Grassmuck.............................................................................................................17 Sharing Sebastian Sevignani.......................................................................................................... Hemetsberger.....................................................................................................117 II.1. Theorien des TeilensDie Kultur des Teilens im digitalen Zeitalter Alexander Unger............................................................................................................ 131 Beitragen, um Aletta Hinsken................................................................................................................ IntroductionThis is a volume of essays about sharing. Few people could have predicted that practices of sharing would gain such prominence in contemporary society. It is, arguably, one of the most unexpected developments of the early 21 st century. Surprising, but not inexplicable. Over the last decade, numerous developments have taken place that created conditions under which new practices could flourish and the roles of sociability and sharing are being re-examined. For example, the very idea of man and woman as homo economicus, that is creatures that will naturally gravitate towards the pursuit of narrow self-interest and, thus, the need of society to organize itself as to make productive use of this supposed essential characteristic, has been called into question with renewed vigor. A global protest movement exposed the depth of the desire to articulate alternative trajectories based on a different set of values than those that appeared to have caused the current financial crisis. At the same time, access to advanced information and communication technology for sharing is increasingly not only available virtually everywhere, but also warmly welcome by vast numbers of people in our societies who allocate substantial amounts of attention, time and effort to experimenting with it and thus interweave it into the fabric of their everyday lives. A number of flagship projects -most notably Free Software and Wikipedia, but also the social web more generally -have shown that sharing and collaboration can lead to results that are comparable, if not superior, to traditionally produced products and that new types of organizations which embody these principles are sustainable, adaptive to changing environments and resilient in the face of dynamic economic developments. An entire generation of media savvy, radically globalized people is growing up with an experience in their personal, daily lives that sharing (digital) goods is an essential dimension of how friendships and communities of all kinds are being built and maintained. At the moment, this experience stands in stark contrasts to other experiences of social life where competition...

No abstract