Hibridación y controversias en los discursos de los comunes: análisis del contenido web y de las redes sociales emergentes

Abstract

In a first approximation, the commons can be understood as resources and services which are (or can become) collectively managed through different types of horizontal self-organization, and which belong to no one: from free software and Wikipedia to communal lands and fisheries. In the last years, and specially since the current crisis, the discourses on the commons have bloomed throughout the literature in different academic disciplines. In this interdisciplinary project, we are interested in the different social agents in Spain who produce and reproduce discourses on the commons and which have presence in the World Wide Web. We select a few case studies (some coming from the P2Pvalue EU-project, in which the group GRASIA at UCM is involved) and we developed a software tool to analyze systematically the web content regarding the discourses on the commons therein. We organize this analysis through different controversial aspects. Starting with a few of them as seeds, we aim to construct an issue network on the commons using web crawling algorithms. Surprisingly, the discourses on the commons are not monolithic. Instead, we find a multiplicity of discourses that we study through the hybridization of four categories or archetypes: the hacker, the left, the autonomous, and the liberal. We believe this work can bring good understanding on both the discourses on the commons (produced and reproduced) and the nature and structure of the social networks that hyperlinks and discursive connections produce.