Peer‐to‐Peer
Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis · The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology · 2017
Abstract For technologically oriented people, peer‐to‐peer (P2P) refers to a distributed form of networking computers, without passing through centralized servers, for different kinds of cooperative endeavors, such as file sharing and music distribution. However, this interpretation is arguably limited in scope. From a broader perspective, P2P can be viewed as a template of human relationships which is springing up throughout the various social fields and follows the same distributed logic. Thus, in general, P2P is the relational dynamic in distributed networks.