To describe the difference between a sharing economy and a commercial one, we must first define what an economy is. According to Lessig, "An 'economy' is a practice of exchange that sustains itself, or is sustained, through time (Lessig 117)." In other words, his definition is similar to my own in which there is a constant trade of resources that makes an economy such a valuable utility to use. For example, I give Best Buy $750 and in turn, they give me a brand new HD TV. To dig a bit more deeper into economies, Lessig states that there are two kinds. Commercial and Sharing economies. A commercial economy is very similar to my Best Buy example where we pay service to a business and expect to receive what we pay for. If I pay $750 for an HD TV, I want the set that is worth exactly that. Don't give me the bulky television set from the 1990's because that's not what I paid for. Since the dawn of the Web 2.0, the commercial economy has made its way online. A couple of successful commercial economies on the Internet that Lessig mentions are Netflix and Amazon. They take the movie rental and book stores from their physical locations and make them more convenient for us by putting them online. Instead of spending time and gas money, E-commerce has exploded in popularity by allowing us to have a commercial economy right at home.
The main point of a sharing economy that I found most useful was that instead of using money to trade and acquire resources, there is a set of complex social relations that govern what information is accessible. Similar to what Lessig states, "There exists not just the commercial economy, which meters access on the simple metric of price, but also a sharing economy, where access to culture is not regulated by price, but by a complex set of social relations (Lessig 145)." I think the sharing economy is similar to the wisdom of crowds and crowd sourcing where sites like Wikipedia allow us to share and collaborate information for "free". I put the word 'free' in quotations because nothing is really free. To access the website Wikipedia, one must first pay their Internet Service Provider to access the Web. Doing it on campus at the library? You pay a semester's amount of tuition to use that computer. The sharing economy emphasizes the building of connections with people. We establish relationships and expect to receive some benefit from those relationships without paying for their services, like jumping a car or quizzing each other for an upcoming test (Lessig 148).
This distinction matters to Lessig's main argument because having the two economies function side by side is vital to balancing our society of information. If we only had a sharing economy for example, I think we act similar to a communist nation (which is not my ideal living conditions). Another reason we need the two economies functioning together is understanding the relevance of the sharing economy and realizing how big it has become since the Internet. I think if we had only one or the other today, our society would not be able to properly function.
