Yochai Benkler’s”The Wealth of Networks” is the Old Testament of social media. It’s long, a bit dry, and nobody ever gets through it – despite the fact we all talk about how important it is anyways. It’s not nearly as exciting as some newer books, those metaphorical New Testaments of social media – books that preach pleasant gospels of untold riches to be had by those businesses who get involved in the groundswells of crowd wisdom, where everything will someday be free. Nevertheless, the Genesis (pun intended) of just such newer gospels is to be found in Benkler’s seminal 2006 achievement.
Moreover, a closer examination will reveal that The Wealth of Networks has a vengeful deity, too, one akin to the god found in the first thousand-odd pages of that most famous of Books. Benkler’s jealous Being is seen in the fundamental message of, at least as I read it, Benkler’s text – that the social production of an information commons and the existence of an alternative to the industrial models of the twentieth century, a networked information economy, does not always have to be about the bottom line. That, it would appear, is a scary message for some, indeed. But for those small few of us who have joined with the covenant people and followed Benkler as our Moses in to the World Wide Wilderness of Sinai, there’s a message of freedom and a better world to be had in networks, the kind of wealth in networks that I feel inspires the greatest economic motivation: sharing knowledge, and lifting others thereby. (more…)
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