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Q: What's this?
A: Notes from the interactive track at SXSW 2010 by one Finnish girl. A mishmash from, related to or inspired by the event.
If I see something that's changing the game I'M ON IT. So let's do this.
PS. for everyone I met in Austin: find me at twitter.com/vuokko and we'll take it from there. Thanks!
“A CD collection was like keeping the box that your Amazon stuff came in and taking it out all the time. You pulled out a piece of plastic and shot lasers at it.”
Clay Shirky (author of “Here Comes Everybody”) made his SXSW enterance by telling that he’d recently had to explain Napster to his too-young-to-remember students at NYU. He then went on to talk about the three modes of sharing. They go as follows.
You can share:
1) goods. (If I give you money then I don’t have it any more, and I may have a feeling that I’ve been taken.)
2) services. (If I do this and invest my time, I will feel good.)
3) information (The easiest of the three to do.)
In other words: imagine an old lady in the street asking:
1) for money
2) to walk her across the street
3) directions to a place
In the words of Shirky: “Before Napster, if someone came to my house and asked if they could have my Vanilla Ice CD I would have said “Noooo!” Then I would no longer have been able to enjoy my beloved Ice Ice Baby.” [Sharing type 1]
Before CDs we had cassette tapes, and making someone a mixtape meant that you shared a service. [Sharing type 2]
And finally: ”All Napster did was take the world of music and make it possible to share it as information.” [Sharing type 3]
Music is information - and information is easy to share.
“Not sharing information. There’s a word for that: spiteful. And ACTA (The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is trying to encourage spitefulness.”
This all comes down to Shirky’s famous statement that abundance is a bigger problem for society than scarcity. When things are abundant, their price goes away - and this changes the way the world works.
