Human beings have historically tried to organize groups, communities and societies by defining the relationship between the collective and the individual. This pertains to the structuring of political entities or economic systems and in a broader sense to the decision as to who may access and use material or immaterial goods that people create. Be it an idea or a physical product, a question emerging simultaneously with its creation is who should be entitled to access or usage of it: everybody, a distinct group or a distinguished individual? Sometimes this question would be asked to ensure the greatest profit possible for the people who created the idea or product (or the people who exercised power over the respective creators) and sometimes the question would be raised in order to warrant the best possible quality of the idea or product itself. The Internet, as an idea and as a variety of products, experienced a rapid development, undergoing many different models of collective and individual participation. If one looks at the ratio (and fashion) of collective and individual usage of the Internet, one could claim that its organization has resembled particular features of different models of government. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the Internet became commercialized and the masses acquired access to it, it was characterized by a distinction between those who produced content and those who consumed it. At that time only a handful of people knew how to use and contribute to it. In the wake of technological innovations, this aristocratic model gradually cleared the way for more participatory structures, which relativized the markedly elitist line between passive consumers and influential producers and enabled almost everybody to do almost everything almost free from regulation; an era of multi-directional interaction of an almost anarchic character with fewer boundaries and well-defined structures, open to participation not only of individuals equipped with technological expertise but also to amateurs. Some of those who grew up with or who assisted in creating this participatory network knew how to use the “freedom” of the masses for their own benefit and evolved into de-facto oligarchic entities. These are only a handful of possible observations but looking at the different forms of collective and individual participation, it seems that the Internet has internalized the most distinct forms of organization, resembling, for example, aristocratic, anarchic or oligarchic structures, or combinations thereof. A lot of thought has been given to the impact of the media on collective and individual behavior, participation and property rights, as well as to the factual and normative questions regarding how the media is and how it ought to be structured. The following seeks to illustrate some of them. One issue regarding the relationship between the collective and the individual is the concern that the vast accessibility and availability of information and communication platforms on the Internet may undermine the public domain that is essential to democracy. People might focus entirely on information channels that are tailored to their personal predilections and will only swap ideas with like-minded individuals. The resulting lack of common experience and the fragmentation of society based on niche interests might pose a threat to democracy and in its most extreme form even nurture extremist thought and behavior. Some claim that this fragmentation is the result of deliberate individual choices, others argue that influential information intermediaries perform the personalized filtering for the users and thereby considerably impact their behavior. This theory suggests that the Internet should be employed in a way that exposes the individual to the collective and vice versa in order to integrate diverse societies and ensure well-functioning democracies. A different perspective questions the democratic potential of the media and emphasizes the threats stemming from government surveillance of online communication and organizational tools that ostensibly enhance free speech and democracy. The argument points out that the same technology that supports freedom of speech and assembly can also facilitate conflicting aims, such as governmental efforts of data collection, predictive censorship, ideological infiltration and targeted propaganda. A further concern of this theory is that the Internet as an inexhaustible source of distraction and entertainment depoliticizes society and lulls political activism. The theory goes that the Internet is both a rather mediocre means of political liberation as well as of political deliberation. Other writers address political questions of a more general character, such as the legitimacy and purpose of proprietary rights within the digital world and the impact of collective access rights on creativity, culture and individualism. One concern in this context is that free and open source software, representing a participatory collective model of production, does not result in better products but in depersonalization and a decline of creativity and innovation. This view observes a decay of content and product quality going hand in hand with the involvement of an anonymous mass in the production process. An opposing view comes to the exact opposite result. It sees no justification for coercive ownership rights in the digital world and advocates free access to information for all – as consumers or active contributors - as the only politically acceptable model in the Internet era and as an endless source of creativity and innovation, the incentive for improvement being the right to access and participation. These depicted theories and approaches represent only a few of the claims and ideas that are being discussed. They have in common that they reflect upon the impact of the Internet on the collective and the individual, as well as on the relationship between them both but they propose different concepts of the role of the collective and the individual in an online world, some featuring democratic others aristocratic or anarchic elements. The variety of strongly differing views implies that the question of how the Internet should be organized in terms of collective and individual participation is still unresolved. The fact that the diversity of the online world provides evidence supportive to all of the afore-mentioned theories suggests that the answer to the question of what might be the right approach may not be found by looking at the Internet’s current nature, as it is too versatile for that purpose. This infers that societies will rather have to make a deliberate decision on how they want to govern the structure and the use of the Internet based on a political concept defining the relationship of the collective and the individual and their respective rights in the online world or leave it open to the most different models of social organization.

To gain a deeper insight into the presented theories see:

Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 - Revenge of the Blogs, 2007 Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble - What the Internet Is Hiding from You, 2011 Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion - How Not to Liberate the World, 2011 Jaron Lanier, Your Are Not a Gadget, 2010 Eben Moglen, The dotCommunist Manifesto, 2003

-- NuschaWieczorek - 03 Nov 2011