å Friday, September 4th, 2015

Cooperative Ethos

Cooperative ethos is brought up by Taylor on page 19 of chapter one as a comparative concept, a third theory to contrast’ “techno-skeptic” social factory, digital feudalism ideas of Lanier and Scholz in which social media users are being used to feed the social economy with due compensation. Cooperative ethos is a concept of “new media cheerleader” Kevin Kelly who sees this new social use of technology as a positive cooperative, a new version socialism – a digital socialism. Kelly interprets the cooperative efforts of users not as exploitative, but a cooperative in which users who make the content should also regulate it. Advertising would not exist as it would mean promoting ourselves to ourselves. In other words, there would be no wealth to share as all profit would be reabsorbed into the cooperative effort. Those in the cooperative are invested in what they do and the reward of maintaining their efforts is the continuation and perpetuation of their media platforms.

Taylor may see the concept of cooperative ethos as an ideal, if not wishful thinking. It disregards the existing free market individualism and centralized authority currently established in our online society, though Kelly feels his concept, if adopted, would make they for-profit establishment non-existent. There is no talk of tearing down, or how to tear down, the current system in order to embrace the utopia of a cooperative ethos.