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.
As Benkler defines it, the networked information economy is an economy that does not have a central hub; it uses inter-networked systems to decentralize production and dissemination. Now, let’s back up a little. Upon reflection, the juvenile rendition, or at least the foundation, of Benkler’s networked information economy really grew up in parallel to modern economic systems: those born of the industrial revolution. An historical overview would show that the original networked information economy was perhaps really born to coincide with the industrial boom of the Western World in the late nineteenth century, not simply after it. Mass media, as it would come to be known, would utilize the effects of the widespread adoption of communications technologies and services, the newspapers and radios and TVs sold and endlessly fed from their disseminating central origins, to sway society from within. Benkler discusses the power of this centralization, that the powers that be have controlled information and have given it away only for a price. But, I think one could pin the seed, or the beginnings of the networked information economy on the birth of the telegraph, insomuch as it represents a potential echo chamber for information otherwise coming from other one-way mediums – although it appears the telegraph’s uses were primarily contained by the mass media and the military. Despite that, I think the networked information economy’s gestation (and its promise) began with such two-way mediums. The restraints of time and geography began their erosion whilst modern industry churned out other mass produced one-way information commodities to assist in that erosion. Yet, information is not a scarce resource in Benkler’s networked information economy, and, it can be controlled from the outside, not centrally. Its reproduction would not forever need to happen on Henry Ford’s assembly line. Many decades later the Internet would herald a new age of communicating that the innovators who laid a foundation for it, albeit in other forms (telegraphs and telephones), could not have conceived of, though through their invention made inevitable.
This lack of vision is mirrored in the modern hopeless expressions we see on the faces of those who have reaped major profits and gained greater power from centralized communications in the past. Incumbents feel the stultifying effects of this wrathful god that is the networked information economy, “weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth“, to employ our scriptural allegory once more, as they slowly lose control to the networked public sphere and its liberal commons. The elite clamor for answers as the disruptive social production of information resources bypasses incumbent services entirely, and the new democratizing effects of the Web crash the old dogs’ party (see the election of our first digital President, for starters). Benkler shoots down many critiques against the democratic effects of the ‘Net, for instance, that the Internet will just take on the same form as it mass media forefathers as incumbents pour more and more money in to it. Central forces, be they governments, mass media entities, or even educational institutions can try, but as long as there are disruptive players with alternative motivations, seeking social capital or otherwise, their efforts are totally m00t (to reference TIME’s 2009 Most Influential Person in the World, 21-year old Christopher Poole, aka 4chan.org founder “moot”).
I recommend “The Wealth of Networks” for anybody who has already converted to the newer social media gospels espoused by the Shirky’s, Li’s, and Anderson’s of the world. These adherents will better understand the messages of such latter-day texts. However, I don’t recommend Benkler to anyone who is looking for ways to reproduce the industrial economic model in the new age of communications. If one does that, expect to be smited by the Old Testament-like wrath that is social production power. Find ways to become an agent in the chaos, not a ruler, and join the tribe.
Reference
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press.
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Tags: book reviews, democratic web, Internet, mass media, social media, social production, Yochai Benkler