Wikipedia. At the first time, when I confronted this new structural concept of the web encyclopedia, I got surprised. I was questioning myself how this voluntary and non-monetary system can be compete-able to preexisting hierarchical system of encyclopedia. I believe it was not only for me but also the most of people who were more familiar with infrastructure of our past life. Adopting new idea and changing to the new are sometimes challenging. Like some of my parents generation are resisting to learn basic computer skills. However, my question and doubt were very easily solved and understood when I faced how efficient and strong the structure of not only Wikipedia, but also the way of peer production.
At this point, I thought we could consider about ‘radical trust’ in this new mode of production. While we, as a new collaborative generation, are assisted to harness our human skill, ingenuity, intellectual mode of production by modifying the service based on self-organizing, egalitarian communities (such as Wikipedia), we must be very excited for its positive impact to our life. On the other hand, sometimes we could be worried about open source environment in which anybody can claim to be an expert on any subject. I think, creditability is a key factor of radical trust. The article says, “nearly two thousand new English-language articles are posted every day on every imaginable subject [in Wikipedia]” (76). This is an incredible amount of participation. In this mass production, I believe it is obvious to face unprofessional knowledge out there however, increasing amount of self-motivated participants could contribute to compensate its lack of completion.
Creative Commons. I was not familiar with this term until yesterday to be honest. I really appreciate to Jody to bringing this topic in this course. I fully understand the concept of this new way of copy right and it is very amazing. People can be free of being creative. They can modify and remix the original content such as pictures and writings without any legal problems. When I was watching Curt Smith’s presentation regarding his cc album, I was very curious how the future of music industry would be. Because, no matter how we remix and modify music sources, I believe yet the modifying and remixing songs is not very common to ordinary people except for just downloading and listening to them. In a perspective of users, it would be very happy to be shared, however, in producers’ aspect, some of them are still not positive. The traditional hierarchy could be described as ‘less productive’ because of ‘copy right’; however, on the other hand it could be reflected not only as ‘more productive’ but also ‘keeping value of originality’. Copy is mother of creation. However, I think sometimes it leads to result in just replication rather than new creative invention. Overall, I’m very fascinated and positive to notion of Creative Commons and I believe ‘we’ are going to find a answer to the friction of evolution.
