KTub8

Digital Solidarity
ability to develop one’s individuality. Thus, networked
individualism seems to be a form of subjectivity that
can address, at the same time, two human needs that
used to be thought of as mutually exclusive: the need
for individual distinction as well as for social recognition
and shared experiences.
The third layer of transformation concerns the
infrastructures for individual and collective agency.
Over the last decade, the infrastructures of digital cooperation
have expanded, matured and been widely
adopted. There are, of course, the major social networks,
like Facebook and all the rest, that are now real mass
media. For all their problems, to which I will return
later, they are very powerful technologies explicitly
focused on co-operation in groups, small and large.
Importantly, they are readily available (technologically
and culturally) and do not require investment in
expensive organisational build up. But these are just the
most popular, consumer oriented parts of a sprawling
infrastructure of digital co-operation. Over the last
few years, the infrastructure as a whole has become so
differentiated that it enables co-operation in socially
nuanced ways, ranging from closeknit trust circles to
more or less complete anonymity. Depending on the
type of co-operation intended, mainstream tools might
be fully sufficient, but there are also more specialised
tools, available on central servers, or those which can
be installed in a decentralised way under full user
control. An example for this are ‘etherpads’. These are, as
Wikipedia helpfully explains,
web-based collaborative real-time editor(s), allowing authors
to simultaneously edit a text document, and see all of the
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