Sharism
The less you share, the less power you have. And the more you share, the more possible it is for you get social support.
- Isaac Mao [1]
Description
1. Isaac Mao:
"Sharism(分享主义 in Chinese) is about sharing, for sure. It means a tendency of sharing your works(everything) to be used by your social network(or public domain), but still keep your right and property based on your consensus. It's really not strange concept especiall after blogging and web 2.0 stuffsemerged for years. As well those new copyright movements, like Creative Commons. You can practise sharism anytime by communicating with others, writing blogs, posting photos, or organizing an offline meetup to generate some group discussions, etc. And step by step, you can feel the change course that you are becoming more open-minded.
An avoidable question raised along sharism. What's the incentive to people if they would like to share? The answer if very simple. You share one piece, you can get times of return. The current social norm may always suggest people that be careful of sharing, otherwise you will lose control of your own stuff, or maybe very dangrous to love prvicy? Is it true? Let me use a metaphor to tell you that actually sharing is in a new space that won't hurt your privcy, instead it shows new possibilities and upside to everyone.' (http://www.isaacmao.com/meta/2007/09/sharism-is-not-communism-nor-socialism.html)
2. Robin Peckham:
"Sharism, broadly speaking, is an ideology that attempts to reconcile the sometimes idealistic cultures of open source and new media theory with the tech business community, creating viable options for both content sharing and progressive models of profitability. Expanding on a conception of “cloud intelligence” that he has presented previously in several exhibitions and essays, Isaac Mao here clarifies how and why everyone from artists and dissidents to investors and marketers should open up their lives and work in order to protect their own interests, offering a solution for networked creativity that moves beyond the Californian ideology at long last." (http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1904)
Discussion
Stefan addresses the difference that Michel Bauwens is making between sharing and commons oriented projects, i.e. individuals sharing their creative expressions vs. the conscious work on a common project.
Stefan Merten:
"On the one hand you see individual sharing which I could imagine means that people produce something on an individual basis and then share it. I guess this type of sharing is the basis of Flickr, YouTube and the like.
What comes to my mind is this: The producers of those goods are as isolated as the typical capitalist producer. There main difference is that they do not produce because of the money but for other reasons.
I may not know the dynamics of such sharing communities - BTW: are they really communities at all? - well enough but to me it looks more like self-realization (ending up in the individual) than Selbstentfaltung (ending up in society). The act of sharing in these communities is just an add-on to an otherwise very individualist pattern. I publish my photos on Flickr because I need a place to show them to some friends.
Only remixing this content would make it a societal thing then - but that's probably not what most people aim to. That would at least explain to me why this type of things feels so different to me. IMHO an interesting thought..
On the other hand you see common production which we can see in Free Software and other communities like Wikipedia or OpenAccess whose aim it is to produce a good. Usually (always?) a good which is useful for more people than the producer group. Here Selbstentfaltung is at work where the effort taken is directly directed to that "super-individual", that societal product."
Isaac Mao Introduces Sharism
Isaac Mao:
Transcripted via We Magazine:
"Isaac Mao first introduced the term four years ago to describe a way of sharing your work (everything) within your social network (or public domain) while still retaining all the rights you wish to retain. Sharism can be practiced easily and at any time when communicating with others – writing blogs, posting photos or organizing offline meet-ups for group discussions, etc. And if you don’t want to practice it, you simply don’t share because Sharism is based on a person’s own individual decision. Sharism is actually a very simple idea and part of our human nature. It should be practised on a daily basis. Sharism is not an assault on other people’s rights. It’s a very personalized mindset and practical spirit. When you practise Sharism you can gradually feel the change operating as you become more open-minded, more knowledgeable, and as your social capital increases. Because the more you share the more you receive.
To translate the theory of Sharism into action, free access to the Internet is of the essence. Sharism itself is critical for overcoming censorship in China. As Isaac Mao says, “There is a ridiculous race going on about censorship in China. Those in power try to get their hands on the very best technology available. But those fighting censorship are actually the ones with this technology and they are the very ones who make it available to undermine the Great Firewall of China. The very ones who share!”
That Sharism is indeed an effective force can be seen from the following example: even though Twitter is officially banned in China each Sunday afternoon without fail the hash tag #GFW (= Great Firewall of China) reaches the No.1 slot in the Chinese Twitter charts – charts that are based on Chinese IP-addresses. The Chinese “twittersphere” is a vivid demonstration of how “easy” it is to bypass the system by sharing. A group of people working on technology tools shares them and their ideas to give people uncensored access to the net. Yet bypassing or helping to do so the Great Firewall of China is actually a very dangerous enterprise that can easily land people in prison or seriously restrict the lives they lead. The government is tightening the screws on this target group. So what still leads them to combat censorship? Isaac Mao’s view is that “For China as a whole it is very important that all people have access to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to a better life. If people know and understand, they can start to act! And I am NOT talking about a revolution; I am NOT talking about overthrowing the government. I am talking about access to basic knowledge for the average Chinese citizen. People should know about the environmental damage the incredible rate of economic growth is bringing with it. They should know how to deal with breast cancer. They should know about the death of natural resources and the damage done to nature. Chinese people need to become aware of these problems. They need to know that they exist. They need to know that censorship exists. They need to gain awareness. Because if they know they will understand. And if they understand – they will act! And the more people act, the greater is the probability that change for the better will happen. If they don’t know, nothing will happen.” So how can change really be achieved? “Look,” Mao points out, “today only 27% of all Chinese people have access to the Internet. And they’re mainly on the east coast, the further you go inland the rarer Internet access becomes. Even so, China still is the world’s premier Internet country – in terms of the absolute numbers of people with access. Chinese is the most written language on the net. Yet all this is just with a mere 27% of the people. So imagine what would happen if the idea of Sharism reaches just 10% of our online community – it will make them a force to be reckoned with practically overnight!”
The idea of Sharism spreads by the mouth-to mouth communication – online and offline. And it has now caught the interest of entrepreneurs and business angels as young successful Chinese business men operating mainly out of Taiwan and Hong Kong are planning to implement Sharism in their software, hardware and business applications. Sharism software is pretty easy to image – it means things like Wikipedia or social translation platforms like yeeyan.com. But what about the hardware? Isaac Mao smiles and explains, “We want to design a credit system in hardware so that people can easily generate credits based on their sharing activities – meaning you gain points by sharing. And then people can change their credit points into real currency. PayPal and adverts, to give but two examples, can be embedded in hardware – and this is what makes a business application based on an individual decision to share or not to share. Imagine that individuals can share via Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media tools. This gives a huge potential for increasing the capital of Sharism. And this is the sort of pipeline we are now planning …” (http://www.we-magazine.net/we-volume-03/we-share-we-do-not-censor/)
Isaac Mao Discusses Aspects Sharism
Isaac Mao:
The Neuron Doctrine
"Sharism is encoded in the Human Genome. Although eclipsed by the many pragmatisms of daily life, the theory of Sharism finds basis in neuroscience and its study of the working model of the human brain. Although we can’t entirely say how the brain works as a whole, we do have a model of the functional mechanism of the nervous system and its neurons. A neuron is not a simple organic cell, but a very powerful, electrically excitable biological processor. Groups of neurons form vastly interconnected networks, which, by changing the strength of the synapses between cells, can process information, and learn. A neuron, by sharing chemical signals with its neigh-bors, can be integrated into more meaning- ful patterns that keep the neuron active and alive. Moreover, such a simple logic can be iterated and amplified, since all neurons work on a similar principle of connecting and sharing. Originally, the brain is quite open. A neural network exists to share activity and information, and I believe this model of the brain should inspire ideas and decisions about human networks. Thus, our brain supports sharing in its very system-nature. This has profound implications for the creative process. When- ever you have an intention to create, you will find it easier to generate more creative ideas if you keep the sharing process firmly in mind. The idea-forming-process is not linear, but more like an avalanche of amplifications along the thinking path. It moves with the momentum of a creative snowball. If your internal cognitive system encourages sharing, you can engineer a feedback loop of happiness, which will help you generate even more ideas in return. It’s a kind of butterflyeffect, as the small creative energy you spend will eventually return to make you, and the world, more creative. However, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative productivity, if only because they’ve switched off their sharing paths. People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative choice, her choice will be, Share.
These mind-switches are too subtle to be felt. But since the brain, and society, is a connected system, the accumulation of these micro-attitudes, from neuron to neuron and person to person, can result in observable behavior. It is easy to tell if a person, a group, a company, a nation is oriented toward Sharism or not. For those who are not, what they defend as cultural goods and intellectual property are just excuses for the status quo of keeping a community closed. Much of their culture will be protected, but the net result is the direct loss of many other precious ideas, and the subsequent loss of all the potential gains of sharing. This lost knowledge is a black hole in our life, which may start to swallow other values as well.
Non-sharing culture misleads us with its absolute separation of private and public space. It makes creative action a binary choice between public and private, open and closed. This creates a gap in the spectrum of knowledge. Although this gap has the potential to become a valuable creative space, concerns about privacy make this gap hard to fill. We shouldn’t be surprised that, to be safe, most people keep their sharing private and stay closed. They may fear the Internet creates a potential for abuse that they can’t fight alone. However, the paradox is: The less you share, the less power you have.
New Technologies And The Rise Of Sharism
Let’s track back to 1999, when there were only a few hundred pioneer bloggers around the world, and no more than ten times that many readers following each blog. Human history is always so: something important was happening, but the rest of the world hadn’t yet realized it. The shift toward easy-to-use online publishing triggered a soft revolution in just five years. People made a quick and easy transition from reading blogs, to leaving comments and taking part in online conversations, and then to the sudden realization that they should become bloggers themselves. More bloggers created more readers, and more readers made more blogs. The revolution was viral.
Bloggers generate lively and timely information on the Internet, and connect to each other with RSS, hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks and quotes. The small-scale granularity of the content can fill discrete gaps in experience and thus record a new human history. Once you become a blogger, once you have accumulated so much social capital in such a small site, it’s hard to stop. We can’t explain this fact with a theory of addiction. It’s an impulse to share. It’s the energy of the memes that want to be passed from mouth to mouth and mind to mind. It’s more than just e-mail. It’s Sharism.
Bloggers are always keen to keep the social context of their posts in mind, by asking themselves, Who is going to see this? Bloggers are agile in adjusting their tone ? and privacy settings ? to advance ideas and stay out of trouble. It’s not self-censorship, but a sense of smart expression. But once blogs reached the tipping point, they expanded into the blogosphere. This required a more delicate social networking system and content-sharing architecture. But people now understand that they can have better control over a wide spectrum of relationships. Like how Flickr allows people to share their photos widely, but safely. The checkbox-based privacy of Flickr may seem unfamiliar to a new user, but you can use it to toy with the mind-switches of Sharism. By checking a box we can choose to share or not to share. From my observations, I have seen photographers on Flickr become more open to sharing, while retaining flexible choices.
The rapid emergence of social applications that can communicate and cooperate, by allowing people to output content from one service to another, is letting users pump their memes into a pipeline-like ecosystem. This interconnected- ness allows memes to travel along multiple online social networks, and potentially reach a huge audience. As a result, such a micro-pipeline system is making Social Media a true alternative to broadcast media. These new technologies are reviving Sharism in our closed culture." (http://www.we-magazine.net/we-volume-02/sharism-a-mind-revolution/)