Digital Media and new forms of activism: an interview with Michel Bauwens and Geert Lovink

The text is a cross-interview that investigates the issues of social networks and creativity from a peer-to-peer and bottom-up point of view. The growing multiplicity of information ecologies - and the consequent fragmentation of values and symbolic systems - suggest that we are entering a phase that calls for the ability to let emerge meanings and practices from complexity itself, by questioning the ideology of individual creativity and by evaluating in a new way the social innovation nurtured by peer-to-peer networks. Our worldview has never been so easy to communicate; it has never been so easy to get in contact with individuals and groups that agree with it. Distributed collaboration through digital media is based on the creation of empathic connections made faster and easier by an extremely low friction in the sharing of information and feelings. But if empathy and interests are the first steps to online communities, only specific organization forms tolerate deeper forms of interaction. What are the new forms to look at? And what specific approaches to creativity and innovation are being developed through such practices? How are social networks related to this issue? I asked these questions to Geert Lovink of the Institute of Network Cultures and Michel Bauwens of the Foundation of Peer To Peer Alternatives, two of the most interesting activists and researchers in the domain of digital culture.