10 Big Pieces: Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Yochai Benkler
Yale University Press, New Haven CT 2006

Summary

Benkler argues that the “networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals,” and that they “are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.” As individuals are “less susceptible to manipulation by a legally defined class of others – the owners of communications infrastructure and media,” they have “a significantly greater role in authoring their own lives, by enabling them to perceive a broader range of possibilities, and by providing them a richer baseline against which to measure the choices they in fact make.” (8-9)

We are seeing “the emergence of a new folk culture… where many more of us participate actively in making cultural moves and finding meaning in the world around us. These practices make their practitioners better ‘readers’ of their own culture and more self-reflective and critical of the culture they occupy.” In short, “culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory.” (15)

However, Benkler sees a “battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment,” (22), a “second enclosure movement,” (25) being played out across “all layers of the information environment.” (23) “We still stand,” he writes, “at a point where information production could be regulated so that, for most users, it will be forced back into the industrial model, squelching the emerging model of individual, radically decentralized, and nonmarket production and its attendant improvements in freedom and justice.” (26)

In a chapter on the economics of information production and innovation, Benkler notes that “both in theory and as far as empirical evidence shows, there is remarkably little support in economics for regulating information, knowledge and cultural production through the tools of intellectual property law.” (39)

Benkler contrasts the entertainment products of the “industrial information economy” and the “networked information economy:” “Television culture, the epitome of the industrial information economy, structured the role of consumers as highly passive…. The couch potato, the eyeball bought and sold by Madison Avenue, has no part in making the information environment he or she occupies.” (135)

By contrast, “no single entertainment product better symbolizes the shift that the networked information economy makes possible from television culture than the massively multiplayer online game.” “Movies and television seek to control the entire experience – rendering the viewer inert but satisfied. Second Life sees the users as active makers of the entertainment environment that they occupy, and seeks to provide them with the tools they need to be so. The two models assume fundamentally different conceptions of play. Whereas in front of the television, the consumer is a passive receptacle, limited to selecting which finished good he or she will consume from a relatively narrow range of options, in the world of Second Life, the individual is treated as a fundamentally active, creative human being, capable of building his or her own fantasies, alone and in affiliation with others.” (135-6)

Individuals thus “can now justifiably believe that they can in fact do things that they want to do, and build things that they want to build in the digitally networked environment, and that this pursuit of their will need not, perhaps even cannot, be frustrated by insurmountable cost or an alien bureaucracy.” (139)

The core of the book deals with the rise of the “networked public sphere.” The public sphere is “the set of practices that members of a society use to communicate about matters they understand to be of public concern and that potentially require collective action or recognition.” (177) It is “a term for signifying how, if at all, people in a given society speak to each other in their relationship as constituents about what their condition is and what they ought or ought not to do as a political unit…. The practices that define the public sphere are structured by an interaction of culture, organization, institutions, economics, and technical communications infrastructure.” (178)

“The structure of the mass media resulted in a relatively controlled public sphere,” (178) but with the rise of networked technologies, the “easy possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners into potential speakers and active participants in a conversation.” (213)

“One cannot make new culture ex nihilo. We are as we are today, cultural beings, occupying a set of common symbols and stories that are heavily based on the outputs of the industrial period. If we are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new platform for our needs and conversations today, we must find a way to cut, paste, and remix present culture. And it is precisely this freedom that most directly challenges the laws written for the twentieth-century technology, economy, and cultural practice.” (300)

Benkler concludes that “We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, knowledge and culture. By doing so, we can make the twenty-first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.” (473)

Critique and Analysis

I’m tempted to say, in the language of forum posts, simply “^ This.” Beyond the simplicity of reverse alphabetical order in posting the 10 Big Pieces, they have led to a synthesis, and that is Benkler. I agree with him without significant reservation, and chose this book to cover areas addressed by other likely authors for this list – Henry Jenkins, Lawrence Lessig, Cass Sunstein – as I think Benkler does a more thorough and rigorous job of presenting their arguments than they do, in many cases.

Utility

Thus, Benkler is the grand synthesis, the source of my core argument that it matters that people have the tools to think critically about technology and social change, as the first step of acting to ensure their interests are socially expressed, and not subordinated to a resurgent industrial entertainment state.