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Shirky_2008 (7. Tragedy of the Commons (The commonest collective action…
Shirky_2008
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8. Free riders
People who benefit from a resource while doing nothing in recompense are free riders. Societies have generally dealt with the problem of free riders in one of two ways.
The first way is the elimination of commons, transferring ownership of parts of it to individuals, all of whom have an incentive to protect their own resources.
If six shepherds each own one-sixth of the former commons, the overgrazing problem is a personal one, not a social one. If you overgraze your section, you will suffer the future consequences, while your neighbor will not.
The second way is governance or, as Hardin puts it, 'mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.' This solution prevents the individual actors from acting in their own interests rather than in the interests of the group.
You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs of the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.
Sharing
Sharing creates the fewest demands on the participants. Many sharing platforms, such as Flickr, operate in a largely take-it-or-leave-it fashion, which allows for the maximum freedom of the individual to participate while creating the fewest complications of group life.
Cooperation
Cooperation is the next rung on the ladder. Cooperating is harder than simply sharing, because it involves changing your behavior to synchronize with people who are changing their behavior to synchronize with you. Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity - you know who you are cooperating with. Conversation creates more of a sense of community than sharing does, but it also introduces new problems.
Collaboration
Collaborative production is a more involved form of cooperation, as it increases the tension between individual and group goals. Structurally, the biggest difference between information sharing and collaborative production is that in the latter at least some collective decisions have to be made.
Collaborative production can be valuable, but it is harder to get right than sharing, because anything that has to be negotiated about, like a Wikipedia article, takes more energy than things that can just be accreted, like a group of Flickr photos.
Collective action
Collective action, the third rung, is the hardest kind of group effort, as it requires a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members.
All group structures create dilemmas, but these dilemmas are hardest when it comes to collective action, because the cohesion of the group becomes critical to its success.
Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.
In historical terms, a potluck dinner or a barn raising is collaborative production (the members work together to create something), while a union or a government engages in collective action, action that is undertaken in the name of the members meant to change something out in the world, often in opposition to the other groups committed to different outcomes.
The senario
Imagine you are standing in line with thirty-five other people, and to pass the time, the guy in front of you proposes a wager. He's willing to bet fifty dollars that no two people in the line share a birthday. Would you take that bet?
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- In situations involving many people, they think about themselves rather than the group. But in a group, other people's relationship to you isn't all that matters; instead of counting people, you need to count links between people.
- The groups of photographers were all latent groups, which is to say groups that existed only in potentia, and too much effort would have been required to turn those latent groups into real ones by conventional means.
- The Catholic Church and the U.S. Army are as hierarchical as any for-profit business, and for many of the same reasons. The layers of structure between the pope and the priests, or between the president and the privates, is a product of the same forces as the layers between the general superintendent and a conductor on the New York & Erie. This hierarchical organization reduces transactions coasts, but it doesn't eliminate them.
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- Here, though, we have a situation where the loosely affiliated groups can accomplish something more effectively than the institution can. Thanks to the introduction of user-generated labeling, the individual motivation of the photographers - devoid of financial reward - is now enough to bring vast collections of photos into being. These collections did not just happen to be put together without an institution; that is the only way they could have been put together.
- Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.
Now that group forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy, we are seeing an explosion of experiments with new groups and new kinds of groups.