Benjamin Phelan explores the notion of altruism in his article, while examining the selfless behaviour of ants, bees, and wasps. It has been found that altruism is tough thing to grasp in evolutionary terms. “When you look at pro-social behaviors,” says David Sloan Wilson, “behaviors that are for the good of the group, they’re not locally advantageous. If you’re an altruist, and you’re doing what’s good for the group, that fundamentally requires time and energy and risk on your part.”
Words like altruism, philanthropy, and love are concepts closely tied with humanity and how we relate to others around us. More and more, these ideas are intimately weaved in with technology, science, and innovation – in fact, they are often the reason why people create and share. There is usually a vision to make it better for everyone.
We see this in web projects like Wikipedia where Jimmy Wales set out to give free access to the sum of all human knowledge, Firefox where they believed that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet, and of course, the web itself, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee who fought to keep it free for the masses. In a recent court hearing, Berners-Lee was asked “Who owns the web?” in which he responded, “We do.” Meanwhile, many other innovations are tightly guarded with patents, copyright, licenses, and access to products and services come at a pretty penny. They operate in their own silos and there is an emphasis on ownership and the bottom line.
We touched on this during our bar talk on Friday night, and it got me imagining a utopian web, where everything is free to access and people create to solve a problem for someone else, and participants start from a place of altruism. While I snap out of my dream-like state, I will say that I’m genuinely excited about the influx in terminology around altruistic movements in the web space – ideas like the sharing economy, social good, social entrepreneurship, and collaborative consumption are very compelling to me.
PS. I added a Photostream page with a few snapshots from last week!
Fieldnotes 
I too like to dream ultruistically and I do believe society is moving in the right direction. I do not believe it will reach utopia, however, I think it will get better.
Fascinating!
Tim Berners-Lee was quite an altruist himself, not wanting the wealth and glory that he could have taken by making the web proprietary. While we will never get to utopia, I think we will see more modern day heroes that are willing to prove to society that motives beyond the market economy are just as, if not more valuable.
Looking at the different COMM 506 readings that we have had that touch on altruism, I find it really interesting how theorists continue to struggle with the why – why do individuals in a population (be they bees, wasps, ants, or people) act generously when it is often appears to be in their best interests not to do so. I think it is clear that generosity in the context of our classes’ online networking, does end up helping us build our own networks, but it really is challenging to apply concepts like group evolutionary selection to human scenarios where altruistic behaviours actually help groups to survive.
I really liked the way you and Marc boiled down this article this week. It makes a good case for how socialism and communism has worked over time ~ at the heart of it people are trying to create a better and equal community for all that is filled with opportunity. Great blog post Sylvia!
I will only add that I believe the web was born of utopian visions, and that these humane impulses, such as equality, freedom, sharing etc are baked into the founding architecture, as much as that original foundation has been built upon by corporate forces and layered again by governmental desires for control… those utopian urges still strain and get through in many ways, which you point out. There is a battle for the soul of the internet – all is not lost yet! 😉