The implications of social production have become apparent in many fields in recent times, particularly in free software. The interaction of knowledge and the refinement of ideas is now a good way to encourage and further develop a concept.
This view of production as a collaboration to qualitatively achieve a given aim contrasts with the more traditional view of the market of ideas and knowledge, where the importance lies more with the final adoption of the product than with consensus, fit or quality.
David Bollier's When Push Comes to Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology explores how the evolution of information technology has allowed a new point of view to emerge that contrasts with the centralisation and hierarchy of the traditional model.
Recommended website
D. Bollier(2006). When Push Comes to Pull: The New Economy and Culture of Networking Technology. (http://www.aspeninstitute.org/atf/cf/%7bDEB6F227-659B-4EC8-8F84- 8DF23CA704F5%7d/2005InfoTechText.pdf).
The following sections will now briefly examine the main economic and cultural features of networked culture considered by Bollier.
The push and pull models
The push model is based on mass production, anticipating consumer demand and dynamically managing time and the location of production resources.
The pull model is based on the openness and flexibility of the production platforms used as resources. This model does not anticipate consumer demand, but rather customises products according to demand using fast and dynamic processes.
Value creation networks
In pull models, the sharing of information and best practices substantially improves the corpus of knowledge of all members of the network.
This network promotes and integrates open business models based on the creation of value and product customisation or differentiation.
Hence, pull model platforms formalise, improve and increase the flexibility of innovation and evolution through the community, without incurring the costs of a similar implementation in a push model.
Target market
Push models are successful in areas where consumers are not very clear on what they want and prefer to make their selection based on predefined typologies.
By contrast, in pull models, consumers want to form part of the production and selection process, in the sense that they may not know exactly what they want, but they are sure that they want to participate and form part of the process.
Production
Push models tend to seek alternative forms of production that may be more economically competitive (for example, lower production costs), while pull models tend mainly to seek the best ways to add value to the production network.
This special orientation of pull models favours the scalability of the production network and the union of the best participants for production specialisation.
Cooperation
Pull models favour the creation of relationships based on trust, the sharing of knowledge and cooperation among members of the network, to everybody's benefit.
This ethos is often transformed into a system of collective government for the sustainable and fair management of shared resources.
In this sense, companies based on pull models should provide guarantees for the recognition of network members, since the model is based on trust and the creation of value.
Education
With push models, the activity of students is focused on the construction of static knowledge as prior training for a subsequent hierarchical society.
Pull models promote alternative forms of education in that information technologies allow students to enter a dynamic flow of activity with access to many independent resources for creating their own corpus of knowledge (and sharing it).