The Commons - Jessica

Libraries want to freely circulate information rather than putting a price tag on information.

If they put a price on every reading material, they are only hurting society. This is where the contrast between libraries and a public commons comes in place. For example, if I need to pay even a couple dollars to get an article, I won’t get it because I don’t want it bad enough. That could be a very potential risk for online articles that ask for money. When it’s free more people will participate. It all comes back to what we’ve talked about, how the information we know and have learned is usually not originally ours, but borrowed and learned from someone else.

I like the term commons, and how they describe the purpose of it. When I think of commons, I always think of a place where everyone gathers together for one reason or another. It’s a great term to describe how libraries can be used in the future. The name demonstrates an open free place for discussion of any type. The library, a free source of information that belongs to the public, should not be privatized to make more money. What would life look like if most information on the internet was free for public use? We could be so much more knowledgeable and be bettering society in a million different ways. As they stated in the commons article, the most important gift we can give to society is the ability to educate our children, give the citizens information they need to make good choices, and continually restructure our culture by giving and taking traditions. The commons website was great to look at as I didn’t have trouble accessing any of the articles. I felt empowered to look at information and grow as a person with the accessibility to information.

Vaidhyanathan describes the internet library of information heading towards becoming an anarchy, where our government is in control of it all. This puts limitations on information giving and peer-to-peer sharing of information. He, like Bollier, is worried about the concealment of information on the internet. He is scared that the government will have so much control over the internet that they will be crushing the democracy that we have by controlling what we can look at, give out, and use to better ourselves. They can make money off of it, by putting a price tag on the resources we want to get. The internet should not be this way at all. If we really want to grow in the future, I agree with both of these authors that we need to have a common internet library, where information is free to give and take.