Hi Maha,
What comes to mind for me is the bind we have put ourselves in considering the use and understanding of “free.” So much of what the Internet as a system promised us was so much information, and access to information for “free” – as in, without cost. This was, of course, fantastic, as in “mired in fantasy.”
Because so many of us were willing to believe that we were getting virtually everything for nothing, we also shut our eyes to hidden and implicit costs of these wonderful new options for information access, management and collection. It took us a while before we realized that we were not only consumers and users but in fact that we and our precious data crumbs were and are the product and the fuel source to make the whole system run a profit into a small number of hands.
So now we are deep in with our gadgets and platforms, our cultural output and remarkable levels of social capital, and also very much at the mercy of a few giant companies which dominate and skew the market in their favor, every single time.
Now that we have made a Faustian bargain with the Internet powers that be and have grown accustomed to giving up our data in exchange for access to so much “free” stuff, we are societies reluctant to pay for anything – including quality journalism, among other things. So I’m wondering how the notion of “open” is represented in this dynamic. Has “open” become synonymous with “free” as in, ‘of no charge’? And if so, what implications does that have for knowledge producers now and in the future?
These are just my beginner’s mind musings. We keep hoping the shirt is fixed but also tend to avoid looking below the belt, so to speak.