Avoiding a Tragedy: Information Literacy and the Tragedy of the Digital Commons

Introduction Librarians have long recognized that access to the digital commons has the remarkable potential to neutralize factors that divide the rich and the poor. While access to the digital commons is free, the financial costs of the equipment and the lack of training in the use of the equipment is an obstacle to many people using this unique resource. The disparity in the allocation of this training and equipment is often referred to as the Digital Divide. Librarians continue to work diligently to bridge this divide by providing access to computers and conducting classes in the use of computer technology. By doing so, librarians continue to open access to the digital commons among the poor and technologically challenged that would not have been possible otherwise. While access to the digital commons is burgeoning, it is not without significant problems. Greco and Floridi (2004) have recently pointed out that unchecked growth in Internet access will cause a significant reduction in the quality of the digital commons. As more users gain access to the digital commons there is more competition for bandwidth which contributes to frustratingly slow connection speeds, and finding the information one wants is rendered more difficult because of the proliferation of information added by members of the commons. This difficulty puts librarians in a problematic situation: We are forced to either let the market decide who has the equipment and training necessary to gain access to the digital commons, or we remain a constant factor in the qualitative destruction of this valuable resource. Tragedy of the Commons Is this reduction in quality inevitable? Greco and Floridi argue that it is. They argue that there is an internal logic at play which they call the Tragedy of the Digital Commons. The Tragedy of the Digital Commons draws its name from a problem identified by Hardin (1968). Hardin's insight was that people do not share resources they hold in common without some external force making them share. To exemplify his insight Hardin has us imagine a common pasture open to several herdsmen. Each herdsman wants to maximize his own gains from the pasture with as little cost as possible. So, it makes sense for the herdsman to introduce as many cattle as he can afford because he reaps all the reward from raising the cattle, i.e., selling the cow at auction or selling its milk, and suffers only partial costs because the grass that is eaten belongs to everyone equally. However, as every herdsman has the same incentive to maximize their own number of cows, the pasture is quickly depleted of grass and no one benefits. A similar problem occurs as a result of bridging the Digital Divide. Training people in computer technology and providing Internet access gives more people access to the information commons. It is similar to Hardin's example above, in that it is like recruiting an endless number of shepherds to share the common pasture. However, unlike the scenario that Hardin imagines, the digital commons is not ruined simply because people use the resource. In the digital commons there is no scarcity, as there is plenty of "space" for everyone. Rather, the problem in the digital commons derives from pollution. As more people use the commons and the pollution problem becomes more pronounced; the individual user experience is diminished. The type of pollution is twofold: First, there is the problem of too many people vying for bandwidth at the same time. Without voluntary or coerced cooperation users do not limit their time spent online or the amount of information downloaded and uploaded. This free-for-all makes the service less usable for everyone. Secondly, we have what is created and "left" in the commons. This includes Spam and computer viruses which intentionally take up a vast amount of bandwidth, but also the copious amounts of web-pages, both personal and professional, that one has to sift through when looking for information on the Internet (Floridi, 2002). …