Hey Guys, Thank you for your comments. Sorry for the late reply. Things are hectic at the moment busy with work and there is a wedding in the family Friday :) So I'm afraid I have to keep this short.
I guess the most important thing is balance. There is no opposition between peer learning and institutional learning per se and managed properly they can really complement each other. There is a bias that favours the qualified and naturally its in peoples interest to capitalize on that. To the detriment of peer learning which is undervalued as a result. University degrees hold a different kind of currency. While qualifications are great. Degree or not. The true test of ones knowledge is in action. Its what you do with it that counts or at least should count. The fact that a person cant afford to go to college or acquired their knowledge through different means shouldn't hold them back from pursuing their interest. This is easy to say. But I think things are changing. Making the time and finding a supportive community that shares in your passion where difficult in the past and in many ways this sort of frames our expectations of the present. But now networks have made it so easy for people to find each other, connect and share that there are tangible cultural changes taking place. This is what I find so inspiring about the growth in P2P and DIY culture. What concerns me is that this obvious potential could be completely overlooked by policy wonks who only measure value in monetary terms. Given access to communications tools, computers and access to information people quite obviously have an incredible ability to self organize. There is a kind of horizontal value creation around common interests. But how do you measure the economic value of these knowledge commons? If the economy is solely interested in profits whats follows from that logic is the creation of scarcity through enclosure and privatization. What is so impressive is the resilience of the digital commons. I think we engage in different economies through out the day. Capitalism is not total its just the most obvious and depending on our awareness we can to some degree manage at least our own engagement with it. A household run on capitalist principles where every act and exchange had to be paid for would quickly fall apart. The pay it forward and gift economy is much more the rule in the home and it achieves greater efficiencies because it tends towards the creation of abundance. People accustomed to big families, strong communities, or friendships understand this. You know not to take the piss. When someone starts taking advantage of other peoples good will its cancerous it eats away at the trust in the community. Alternatively when there is trust you know you can rely on each other. You have more options when it comes to dealing with problems. Your more resilient. Capital is always looking for ways in to this. To enclose and capitalize on another facet of social life. Facebook is an obvious example, you end up using it just because everyone else does and then your caught, if your not in you miss out on events and all sorts of things. The point I'm trying to make is that the Internet allows these sharing economies we find in families and local communities to scale. Capitalism depends a lot more on these economies than it would like to admit. I came across these studies before showing that income does not necessarily equate with happiness. I cant remember which one but it showed that people in underdeveloped countries where often just as happy if not more so than people in developed countries. Money is a tool for measuring certain kinds of wealth but there are aspects of social life where its use would become a hindrance. So when we see that people are living on a $100 a month we don't understand how that is possible. I think what makes it possible is the other gift economies, exchanges and relationships that we cant see in statistics that only consider wealth in monetary terms. Anyway I'm going off on tangents and loosing my train of thought. So I'm going to leave it at that for the moment. All the best Kevin _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
