Connecting Human Silos

connections, by Jayne K on Flickr, licensed CC BY 2.0

As an organization dedicated to realizing the full potential of the internet, Creative Commons is deeply invested in having people connect and interact with each other as humans when they function online. That sounds simple. It is anything but. At its core, it is about figuring out how we will interact and work together in productive, positive ways when we have technology at our fingertips.

It just so happens that scholars, technologists, activists, and policy makers all over the world are grappling with this fundamental question at the same time — but from a million different angles, for a million different reasons. The purpose of this space is to start to curate some of the best thinking on these issues, brainstorm, connect dots, and eventually find solutions to apply to the work we do around online sharing and collaboration.

Here is a start.

1. We spend a lot of time talking about information silos. Algorithms that reinforce echo chambers by feeding us content we are more likely to agree with. Copyright rules that create silos of massive pools of creativity on corporate social media platforms. But maybe this is the wrong frame. Behavioral psychology tells us we are, each of us, human silos. In her brilliant little book, The Trouble With Reality, Brooke Gladstone shows us just how insular and close-minded we all really are. Perhaps the great opportunity of the Web is not that it enables us to move information and ideas from one rational vessel to another (it doesn’t), but that it enables us to connect one messy, complicated human being to another.
2. David Byrne wrote a must-read essay about the ways technology is eliminating the need for human contact. While this change has ushered in new gains speed and efficiency, we have also lost something. One-to-one human interactions are slower, but they are also more deliberate, and often more humane.
3. The great promise of the internet is that it instantly allows communication and interaction to scale. We tend to overvalue scale — and for good reason. It is logical to think something that affects a lot of people is more important than something that affects one. The problem is that most of our meaningful interactions do not happen at scale. They are one-to-one, or close. In her recent interview with Ezra Klein, danah boyd talks about how overvaluing scale has skewed the dynamics of the Web.