&lt;div class=&quot;track&quot;&gt;&lt;img alt=&quot;&quot; src=&quot;http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.22.2/64500?ns=guardian&amp;pageName=Untangling+the+web%3A+Ownership%3AArticle%3A1647212&amp;ch=Technology&amp;c3=Obs&amp;c4=Social+networking%2CInternet%2CMMORPG+%28games+genre%29%2CPsychology+%28Science%29%2CFacebook%2CGames+%28Technology%29%2CTechnology&amp;c5=Digital+Media%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CTechnology+Gadgets%2CCorporate+IT%2CGames%2CFamily+and+Relationships&amp;c6=Aleks+Krotoski&amp;c7=11-Oct-16&amp;c8=1647212&amp;c9=Article&amp;c10=Feature&amp;c11=Technology&amp;c13=Untangling+the+web+with+Aleks+Krotoski&amp;c25=&amp;c30=content&amp;h2=GU%2FTechnology%2FSocial+networking&quot; width=&quot;1&quot; height=&quot;1&quot; /&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;p class=&quot;standfirst&quot;&gt;How games and social networks that encourage sharing are blurring old ideas of personal property &ndash; and even identity&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To have and, if possible, to hold is to be and to do, said Jean-Paul Sartre in his essay &lt;em&gt;Being and Nothingness&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being,&quot; he wrote in 1949. &quot;I am what I have&hellip; what is mine is myself.&quot; Researchers have spent hundreds of years trying to define when and how this integrated idea of possession as something that makes us who we are developed, what it means, its function and whether it&#039;s exclusively human. The short answers to these questions are typically evasive which is probably why the introduction of a new technology that puts this debate to the fore has left us floundering in a social, philosophical and moral morass.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The web erodes our sense of what can be owned &ndash; whether it&#039;s ours or someone else&#039;s creation &ndash; because a virtual thing can be &quot;owned&quot; by a vast number of people at the same time. It becomes hard to pinpoint who can claim original rights to the thing and who has access to it. I can have a copy of a photo, a song, a document or a site on my computer, and a million other people can have the same on theirs. I can exercise ownership rights by giving these assets to whomsoever I like, and the person who originally created them can&#039;t do a thing about it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thus, with no obvious owner, and with a sense that, by virtue of its market abundance, a piece of content&#039;s value is cheap, it can be inferred that it&#039;s psychologically and morally justifiable to take ownership of things online by simply claiming them. But is what we&#039;re witnessing in the marketplace of &quot;the economy of the mind&quot; described by John Perry Barlow, cyberlibertarian, Grateful Dead lyricist and author of &quot;A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace&quot;, a shift in our psychological concept of ownership? Not really: it&#039;s just context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no indication that theft of physical property is on the rise unless, as observed in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/london-riots&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;UK riots&lt;/a&gt; in August 2011, isolated incidents transform localised social norms to say it&#039;s OK. Contrary to the headlines, downloading stuff online hasn&#039;t made us more likely to pinch a DVD from a shop. No, as Brian Sheehan and his colleagues at Syracuse University reported in their paper &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15456870.2010.521471&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;Motivations for Gratifications of Digital Music Piracy Among College Students&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, we&#039;ll take control of things that appear &ndash; because of our social environment &ndash; to be there for the taking. Just like offline. It doesn&#039;t matter that the things that once were physical are now abstractions in the cloud that we tap into when we want them. What&#039;s changed is how much stuff we have access to that is &ndash; because of the social contracts we operate within online &ndash; seemingly free.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The proliferation of digital ephemera has not changed the psychological experience of ownership. Psychological ownership implies an identity transference, often due to some kind of investment. This still happens with digital-only creations and, frankly, is encouraged. Web developers offer extensive libraries of personalisation options to appeal to our desire to own.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Take an example from the game industry: massively multiplayer online games specifically design their products to encourage long-term interactions by giving players &quot;ownership&quot; of their avatars and virtual property. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2005/sep/08/whendevelopers&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;The demise of the game &lt;em&gt;Asheron&#039;s Call 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;em&gt; &lt;/em&gt;at the end of 2005 caused widespread virtual protests and led some traumatised players to real-world therapy sessions because they felt they had lost pieces of themselves at the flip of a switch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Psychological bruises also appear when a thing is taken from one context without an owner&#039;s permission and put into a new one that doesn&#039;t mesh with the identity of the original owner. Uploading personal photos to social networks immediately divests them from an owner&#039;s portfolio; not only are they now the property of the social network developers, but they are assumed &ndash; because of how we&#039;ve socially constructed the online space &ndash; to be public property. They can be accessed and appropriated by anyone; Facebook photos are liberally snatched from open accounts and splashed across newspapers, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/sep/20/stepping-hill-nurse-media-arrest&quot; title=&quot;&quot;&gt;nurse Rebecca Leighton&lt;/a&gt; discovered after her arrest and subsequent release without charge over patient deaths last summer. The question of psychological ownership in the virtual world extends beyond the artefacts you create: even your identity is everyone&#039;s property.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The system of social transaction we operate within online is not new, but the web has exploded it to a massive scale. The creative and legal outcomes are other people&#039;s concern: I&#039;m only interested in how the web affects the individual, and digital or not, the research demonstrates that the sense of psychological ownership over binary digits is extremely real. The conflicts are apparent: the perceived personal value remains the same, yet the norms of the space assert a free for all. Is the answer a psychological or social shift in the web-world towards a collaborative model of ownership? Given the research that says that psychological ownership has evolved because of our physical needs for security, food and reproduction, and for our social need to control, I&#039;d be surprised if such a shift occurred just because of a technology.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Psychologically, we lay claim to things because they represent who we are and we derive pleasure from this form of self-expression. The web has created a rich transaction space with unknown boundaries. It&#039;s what we cannot control that&#039;s causing the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;related&quot; style=&quot;float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;&quot;&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/socialnetworking&quot;&gt;Social networking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet&quot;&gt;Internet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/mmorpg&quot;&gt;MMORPG&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/psychology&quot;&gt;Psychology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/facebook&quot;&gt;Facebook&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/games&quot;&gt;Games&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;author&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/alekskrotoski&quot;&gt;Aleks Krotoski&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;terms&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.guardian.co.uk&quot;&gt;guardian.co.uk&lt;/a&gt; &amp;copy; 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. 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