Digital networks are not important because of their physical capacity to transmit on and off signals very rapidly, but because those signals are the building blocks of symbols that humans use to persuade, inform, and organize other humans into joining or refraining from collective action. The term \"collective action\" may be dry, but the mysterious magic than enable homo sapiens to use symbols to organize group activities like hunting or agriculture is what distinguished our ancestors from the other scrawny primates on the savannah, surrounded by much more powerful, much swifter, much better armed predators. \"Collective action\" is the term sociologists, political scientists, and economists use to describe the human capability to organize group activities to produce something that individuals could not produce on their own -- from hunting and gathering to dams to democracies. Although this might seem far removed from the questions posed by digital networks, our species might be in for another leap into an entirely different level of complexity and way of life, depending on how we use digital networks to collaborate in new ways and on new levels. In that regard, a generative question is: In what ways do communication media and practices influence the capability to organize collective action?

The \"social dilemma\" is another term of art in the social sciences to describe the situations that inevitably arise from the tension between self-interest and collective gain, when, in Peter Kollock\'s words \"individual rationality adds up to collective irrationality,\" when acting in one\'s self interest ends up damaging or failing to provide for the interests of everybody. In recent years, such diverse but pressing pragmatic problems as the human population explosion and the possiblity of thermonuclear war attracted scientists from very different disciplines to pursue inquiries regarding collective action -- what empirical evidence can be gathered about the forms of human cooperation and the barriers to it, and what pattern does the data reveal? Robert Axelrod was concerned about the strategic gameplaying involved with thermonuclear strategy during the cold war, and also curious about why cooperation evolved in a competitive Darwinian environment, so he asked people to program cooperation games that computers could play. Between them, Ostrom, Axelrod, and Kollock could define the foundation for a new interdiscipline of cooperation studies.

Collective Action