The Wealth of Networks
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006.
A PDF of the book is downloadable under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license. Benkler has said that his editable online book is "an experiment of how books might be in the future", demonstrating how authors and readers might connect instantly or even collaborate.
Summary
Part 1: The Networked Information Economy
Benkler describes the current epoch as a "moment of opportunity" due to the emergence of what he terms the Networked Information Economy, a "technological-economic feasibility space" that is the result of the means of producing media becoming more socially accessible. Benkler states that his methodology in the text is to look at social relations using economics, liberal political theory, and focuses on individual actions in nonmarket relations.Benkler sees communication and information as the most important cultural and economic outputs of advanced economies. He traces the emergence and development of various communications through the 19th and 20th centuries as functions of increasingly centralized control due to the high cost factor of production, and believes that media was thus produced on an industrial scale. Benkler's term for this is the Industrial information economy.
With the emergence of computers, networks, and increasingly affordable media production outlets, Benkler introduces the concept of the NIE, which sees media access as a form of power, and recognizes decentralized individual actions in said media as a result of the removal of physical and economic constraints to the creation of media. To Benkler, this is due to a new feasibility space: lowered costs of access via digital production and radical decentralization rather than centralized messaging.
This results in emerging productions of information that use non-proprietary strategies.
Goods
The forms of cultural productions — music is an example Benkler uses frequently — are either rival or nonrival. Rival products decrease as they are used, the use of nonrival products does not decrease their availability for further use.Static vs. dynamic efficiency: one premise of exclusive rights has always been that only financial incentives can facilitate participation in information production. Benkler argues that in an age where computers reduce the cost of production, that the equation of innovation-to-rights shifts as well.
The declining cost of communication means that in the networked society there are fewer barriers for individual cultural production that are "meaningful" to other users. Thus, in network economy, "human capacity becomes primary scarce resource".
Peer production
To close this section, Benkler argues that the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: that of commons-based peer production. He discusses the parameters of the commons and gives the example of FLOSS Free/Libre/Open/Source/Software. He discusses shared acts of communication and goods. Lastly, he draws a contrast to the regulation and rival resource of radio spectrum bandwidth and the sharability of space in a digital commons.The economics of social production
Benkler argues here that the networked society allows for the emergence of non-hierarchical groups that are committed to information production. Open software is one of the ways we can view the emergence of this new form of information production. "Commons-based" peer production eschews traditional rational choice models offered by economists. Benkler details some of the key components of this new economy based not on financial remuneration but on user-involvement, accreditation, and tools that promote collaboration between individuals.In order to understand why people engage in production aside from financial incentives, Benkler argues that we can distinguish two types of motivation:
- Extrinsic motivation: motivation that comes from outside in the form of financial reward, punishment, etc.
- Intrinsic motivation: motivation that derives from within ourselves, such as the pleasure involved in completing a task.
Part 2: The Political Economy of Property and Commons
He examines the historical emergence of the mass media, looking at the relationship between print and radio and ever-broadening, industrial broadcast models of production which became supported by advertising. The criticisms of mass media which Benkler brings up include:
- its commercialism, because he sees that as supporting the development of programs that appeal to large audiences rather than specific interests, in the name of mass broadcasting;
- limited intake of information, due to the relatively small number of people gathering information;
- too much power assigned to too few people.
From passive to active
For Benkler, another key component of the network society is that individuals are more active in producing their education and cultural production. Online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia allow for users to create rather than just consume knowledge and information.Part 3: Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation
Benkler begins chapter 10 stating two early views on the anticipated social impact the internet would have on the users and their community:Firstly, the internet removed the user from society and allowed the individual to lead a life that was no longer molded by the interactions and experiences of a physical tangible civilisation with others. The second view was that using the internet would widen the field of a user's community by providing a novel system of communication and interaction.
He observes that users show enhanced relationships with their close contacts while increasing the numbers of less close contacts with relationships maintained through internet mediated interaction. He believes this latter change stems from the shift from the one-to-many model of media distribution to a many-to-many model where it is more user centered and controlled.
Benkler remarks that the early views were made on the premise that internet communication would replace real world forms communication rather than co-exist alongside it. He introduces the idea of the networked-individual who govern their own interactions and microcommunity roles in both real and virtual space and dynamically switch between when needed, eventually concluding that the early views were nostalgic and somewhat fatuous.
A definition is offered whereby cultural freedom occupies a position that relates to both political and individual autonomy, but is synonymous with neither. Benkler then goes on to add that culture is significant because that is the context within which we exist – these are our shared understandings, frameworks, meanings and references.
Reception
When Benkler's The Wealth of Networks was released in 2006, Lawrence Lessig announced the release of the book on his blog, stating: “This is—by far—the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this.” The Wealth of Networks has been reviewed by many other blogs in addition to the Lessig blog, including Rough Type, Dreams in Digital, , and Reading Media Under The Tree. The book has been reviewed in The German Law Journal and The Independent Review. Book reviews of The Wealth of Networks have also been featured by several news publications, including The Financial Times, The Times, and the New Statesmen. In addition to book reviews, interviews with Yochai Benkler about The Wealth of Networks have been conducted and published by openDemocracy.net, openBusiness.cc, and Public Knowledge, and Benkler was invited to give a lecture based on The Wealth of Networks at the Center for American Progress on May 31, 2006.Less than a month after its release in 2006, The Wealth of Networks became the focus of an intense read and review seminar on the famous political blog Crooked Timber. After reading the book, six well-respected scholars posted their reactions to the book, and at the end of the seminar, Yochai Benkler was given the opportunity to respond to the comments.
Writing style
In terms of Benkler's writing style, criticism on Crooked Timber targeted two main points: 1) that the book is written in a style that is too dense for the average reader, and 2) that it attempts to cover too many topics. As Dan Hunter points out in his review titled “A General Theory of Information Policy”, The Wealth of Networks is an attempt to articulate an underlying, grander “whole” that ties together the myriad issues involved in information policy and the internet. Hunter states: "Benkler provides something close to a General Theory of Information Policy for the networked age that begins to explain how we should think about topics as different as spectrum policy, copyright, user-generated content, network neutrality…well, the list pretty much encompasses all questions within internet law and policy." Hunter's main criticism of the book is that it is too academically dense for the average reader, and too reliant on assuming the reader is familiar with several internet organizations and websites, such as Wikipedia, PayPal, and Slashdot. As Hunter later states:Physical hardware and infrastructure
Another criticism of Benkler's theory is that so much focus is given to the potential of peer-production and innovation in the networked information economy, but little to no attention spent addressing issues related to the physical hardware required to keep the network that Benkler's theories rely on up and running. In a review of the book by Siva Vaidhyanathan, Benkler's “soft technological determinism” is brought under fire. Vaidhyanathan states:Benkler addressed this criticism in his response to Vaidhyanathan's review, conceding that perhaps more attention to the physical elements of the networked information economy could have been given:
In a review of the book by Ben Peters, a similar sentiment to Vaidhyanathan's criticism is expressed: “It may also do very well to account for massive information infrastructure costs, the fiber optic cables, the wifi, and the laptops that the Benkler's optimism depends upon in the international development scene.” In The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, Peter G. Klein stated:
Optimism
Derek Belt, who reviewed the book on his blog titled “Dreaming in Digital”, targeted Benkler's optimism as his main point of criticism, suggesting that Benkler's optimism was too rooted in what was possible in the future, neglecting to take into consideration the position in which we as a society find ourselves in at the present time in relation to information policy. He states:In contrast to these attacks on Benkler's optimism, a review by Debora Halbert suggested that:
Jack Balkin, a participant on in the Crooked Timber read and review took a similar stance in his interpretation of Benkler's optimism, stating:
The Wealth of Networks has been criticized for technological determinism. David M. Berry contends that Benkler's work builds on "a rather shaky binary distinction between proprietary industrial forms of economic and technological structure and non-proprietary peer-production models". Berry challenges Benkler's assumptions that network fosters non-proprietary models and that the latter are sounder and ethically preferable to the former model. According to Berry, Benkler fails to recognize that should network forms of organization happen to be wealth generating, "they will be co-opted into mainstream ‘industrial’ ways of production. To paraphrase Steve Jobs, the corporate world may soon provide peer-production for the rest of us." Johan Söderberg links Benkler's optimism towards networked modes of production to a larger current of thought generated by the hacker community. Drawing on Serge Proulx' work, Söderberg asserts that such a narrative, neoliberal in origin, recomposes the discussion on information society in a problematic way: "The fantasy of a frictionless market in information is transformed into a vision of an information-sharing society".