Hands off the ‘netizen’ quest

公文俊平

Today’s industrial society enables people to pursue private profits in a diverse way. The results have been amazing. Economic activity has expanded over the years, and people’s micro-economic activism has helped create a desirable macro-economic social order.

（Japan Times, 8 November 2004, the auther added modifications slightly.)

Today’s industrial society enables people to pursue private profits in a diverse way. It is not a license, however, to do anything for profits. Murder, theft and bribery, for example, are prohibited. But people are free to make and market products of their own choice − at their own risk. The results have been amazing. Without reliance on authorities for planning and control, a semblance of balance has been established in the supply of and demand for goods and services that people need. Economic activity has expanded over the years, and people’s micro-economic activism has helped create a desirable macro-economic social order.

Not all has been well, though. The balance between supply and demand and economic growth has been affected by boom-or-bust economic cycles. Serious disparities have developed in the distribution of wealth and income. The free market has produced not only spectacular successes but also dismal failures. This has led to efforts to create a more desirable order through government intervention − or attempts at governance of the market or the economy. Industrial nations have introduced varied regulatory policies such as antimonopoly, income-redistribution and business-cycle control measures.

Developing countries, meanwhile, has adopted development-oriented policies in an attempt to achieve desirable results more quickly, without repeating the mistakes of advanced nations.

Many of these policies have failed, however. Socialist systems have collapsed, and history shows that liberal governments’ economic policies have failed to eliminate economic fluctuations, inequalities in income distribution and environmental disruptions in affluent societies. Furthermore, concerns are increasing over long-term economic slumps and structural imbalances in supply and demand in some industries.

Awareness of these systemic problems is likely to have stirred mounting calls for drastic structural reform, rather than partial modifications and improvements of the existing order. The question is: Will we ever succeed in structural reform while failing miserably in daily economic management? Will we solve the problem by merely raising the targets?

What is important now is“informatization,” or social change that is qualitatively different from industrialization. Citizens played a major role in industrialization, and I believe that “netizens”will play a no less important role in informatization. They will engage in diversified activism, as citizens did in industrialization. If citizens sought profits or wealth through their activism, netizens will seek a reputation or wisdom. Netizens will create and share knowledge and information instead of producing and marketing goods and services as citizens did. If marketing involved ownership and proprietary rights of goods and services, sharing knowledge and information will involve free and open propagation and use of knowledge and information.

If the social legitimacy of netizens’ microeconomic activism is widely recognized, what social changes can we expect from the free sharing of knowledge and information on communications network? A macro-level social order similar to the one created by the free marketing of goods and services.

Thus, without government planning and control, balance will be achieved in the supply of and demand for various pieces of knowledge and information. Furthermore, quantitative and qualitative improvement of the knowledge and information that people have is likely. This is the fruit of informatization.
Informatization will no doubt have its negative side, as industrialization did. Sharing of knowledge and information will be subject to boom and bust, and the distribution of knowledge and information is likely to be even more unequal than that of wealth and income.

Nevertheless, it is perhaps premature to grumble about problems of the “digital divide” and call for governance of communications networks, especially the Internet. Trying to curb netizens’ activism is out of the question. Instead, we should demand a laissez-faire approach to the use of knowledge and information.

（ この記事は10月30日の『産経新聞』「正論」記事を英訳したものです。）