The Wealth of Networks
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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by law professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006.
A complete PDF of the book is freely downloadable on the wiki of the book and is available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license.
[edit] Summary
[edit] Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge
Chapter 1 sets the stage for the entirety of Benkler’s argument as he calls forth the “emergence of a new stage in the information economy, the wealth of networks.” He establishes three observations about the emerging information production system. 1) Non-proprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of products, even when economics suggested that industrial models would thrive 2) There has been a rise of importance within nonmarket production 3) There has been a rise of importance within peer production of information, knowledge, and culture
The result of these three observations is that individuals can now do alot more as social beings rather than as market actors through the price system. According to Benkler, this shift in networked information results in several changes within democratic societies. These include: 1) Enhanced Autonomy a) improves the capacity for people to do more for themselves b) enhances ones capacity do do more in loose commonality with others and without being constrained to market economic system c) improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate alongside the market sphere 2) The Networked Public Sphere: a) According to Benkler this will enable a shift from the mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere where it is more difficult to buy attention on the internet than it is in mass media outlets, and harder still to use money to squelch an opposing view. 3) Justice and Human Development: a) Benkler proposes that free access to information will improve the equality of opportunity for those who are the worst off 4) A Critical Culture and Networked Social Relations: a) makes culture for more transparent b) makes culture more malleable Benkler makes the argument that this new mode of communication not only allows us to keep close familial ties, but also allows increased contact with those who are more diverse from us and with whom we would not stay in touch with if we didn’t have this mode of communication.
FOUR METHODOLOGICAL COMMENTS: Benkler goes on to make reference to four methods which he relies on throughout his thesis. 1) He assigns a significant value to the role of technology. 2) He offers an explanation centered on social relations but operating in the domain of economics rather than sociology. 3) He is offering a liberal political theory but taking a path that has usually been resisted in that literature. 4) His approach emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations.
ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS: Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. Benkler’s book will explore exactly how this effects human affairs.
ROLE OF ECONOMIC ANALYSIS AND METHODOLOGICAL INDIVIDUALISM: For Benkler, the emphasis is on the specific relative roles of market and nonmarket sectors, and how that change anchors the radical decentralization that he too observes as a matter of sociological observation.
ECONOMIC STRUCTURE IN LIBERAL POLITICAL THEORY: 1)Benkler is first concerned with human beings, with individuals, as the bearers of moral claims regarding the structure of the political and economic systems they inhabit. 2) Concerned with human beings in historical settings, not with representations of human beings abstracted from their settings. He treats property and markets as just one domain of human action, with affordances and limitations.
WHITHER THE STATE? Benkler puts forth that the state has played a role in supporting the market based industrial incumbents of the 20th century information production system at the expense of the individuals who make up the merging networked information economy. Benkler says that the liberal, democratic state will not fall apart but rather be strengthened by the model that he puts forth as the freedom of action for individuals, both alone and in loose cooperation with others, can achieve much of the liberal desiderata that he puts forth throughout the book. Globally, this will also increase the freedom of individuals in nonliberal states.
THE STAKES OF IT ALL: THE BATTLE OVER THE INSTITUTIONAL ECOLOGY OF THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT: Benkler feels that the single most threatening development at the physical layer has been an effort to require the manufacturers of computation devices to design their systems so as to enforce the copyright claims and permissions imposed by the owners of digital copyrighted works. He feels that if copyright claims are not enforced at this level, after a period of instability a new and better alignment will develop.
PART ONE: THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY: The Internet is the first mode of communication that expands its reach by DECENTRALIZING the capital structure of production and distribution of information, culture and knowledge. This started off within the industrial information economy. Take for example, the music industry which produced records in order to sell their music. Both the capacity to make meaning and the capacity to communicate ones meaning around the world are held by millions of internet users around the world. Part 1 of the book is dedicated to explaining the technological, economic transformation that is making these practices possible.
[edit] Chapter 2: Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation
Benkler begins this chapter by stating that information is typically considered a public good. Information is nonrival in that its consumption by one person does not make it any less available for consumption by another.
The reason why information has not pervaded the world for free is because of economic incentives. In other words, people will not produce new information if they know that their products will be available for anyone to take for free. However, Benkler challenges this assumption and says that is only correct to the extent that it accurately describes the motivations of information producers.
Another quirky aspect of information that makes it difficult to classify economically is that today’s users of information are not only today’s readers and consumers: they are tomorrow’s innovators. A recent study finds that when a country makes a policy change increasing the patent law, research and development slightly decreases because current innovators have to pay on existing knowledge more than it increases their ability to appropriate the value of their own contributions.
Benkler then examines where incentive stems: 1) nonmarket sources; both state and nonstate 2) market actors whose business models do not depend on the regulatory framework of intellectual property Benkler then goes on to give an example of an industry that one normally considers copyright dependent, but in reality really isn’t: newspapers. Daily newspapers couldn’t survive if they just waited for one another to print stories and then copied one another. Benkler also establishes the fact that their revenue stems mostly from advertisements, and not what the reader pays for the actual newspaper. Therefore Benkler states that this industry, which is supposedly protected by copyrights, would go on performing just as well without copyrighted protection.
THE DIVERSITY OF STRATEGIES IN OUR CURRENT INFORMATION PRODUCTION SYSTEM: In this section Benkler goes through the many nonexclusive strategies for benefit maximization which can be pursued by both market and nonmarket actors. An ideal way of conceptualizing the copyright strategy can be referred to as the “Romantic Maximizer”. This conceives of the information producer as a single author or inventor laboring creatively but in expectation of royalties. However, the Romantic Maximizer is rarely the case and Benkler goes on to establish several other paths that are taken such as the “Mickey” in which a larger firm already owns and inventory of exclusive rights, through both in house development as well as by buying from Romantic Maximizers. He also discusses something he calls “RCA” a barter among the owners of inventories. He also goes on to make an example of IBM which has combined both supply and demand side economic strategies to adopt a nonproprietary business model which has proven to be successful. It invested more than a billion dollars in free software developers in order to provide it with a better operating system. The point of this section is to prove that there are many ways of producing knowledge and information in today’s society.
THE EFFECTS OF EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS: Strong intellectual property rights result in a new form of inefficiency. If these are disable, then there will be many more niche markets as a result of the internet. Strong exclusive rights will only increase the attractiveness of exclusive rights-based strategies at the expense of nonproprietary strategies, whether market-based or nonmarket based.
STRONG EXCLUSION RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT: The outcome of the conflict between the industrial information economy and its emerging networked alternative will determine whether we evolve into a permission culture, as Lessig warns and projects, or into a society marked by social practice of nonmarket production and cooperative sharing of information, knowledge and culture, which in turn can improve freedom and justice in liberal societies.
[edit] Chapter 3: Peer Production and Sharing
Benkler begins this chapter by stating that according to the late twentieth-century American, it should not be the case that thousands of volunteers will come together to collaborate on a complex economic project. This, however, is exactly what is occurring without the presence of a price or even a future monetary return. Benkler attributes this to something referred to as commons based peer production. The emergence of free software suggests that the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production in a radically decentralized, collaborative and nonproprietary way, The market has been run based on two concepts in the past: 1) Centralization: the response to the problem of how to make the behavior of many individual agents cohere into an effective pattern or achieve an effective result 2) Decentralization: the conditions under which the actions of many agents cohere and are effective despite the fact that they do not rely on reducing the number of people whose will counts to direct effective action Benkler suggests, that what we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.
FREE/OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE: In free open-source software participants retain copyrights in their contribution but they license then to anyone/everyone. What is now a booming trade began as the brainchild of a couple of people. The first of these was a one Mr. Stallman of MIT who wanted a world in which software enabled people to use information freely, where no one would have to ask permission to change the software they use to fit their needs to to share it with a friend for whom it would be helpful. From this stemmed the GNU or General Public License. This license allows anyone to contribute to the GNU project without worrying that one day they will wake up and find that someone has locked them out of the system that they helped build.
PEER PRODUCTION OF INFORMATION, KNOWLEDGE, AND CULTURE GENERALLY: The older form of media, such as a major news station was able to produce the utterance, give it credibility and clearing and then distribute it all simultaneously. The internet disaggregates many of these tasks.
UTTERING CONTENT: With the internet, the task of sifting and accrediting falls to the user, motivated by the need to find an answer to the question posed. Wikipedia, was founded by Jimmy Wales and used three factors to make it successful. 1) It uses a collaborative authorship tool, the Wiki which allows anyone to edit and store all the different versions. 2) It is a self conscious effort at creating an encyclopedia governed first and foremost by a collective informal undertaking to strive for a neutral point of view within the limits of substantial self-awareness as to the difficulties of such an enterprise. 3) All content generated by this collaboration is released under the GNU Free Documentation License. Benkler goes on to state that this combination of an explicit statement of common purpose, transparency, and the ability of participants to identify each other’s actions and counteract the - that is, edit out the ‘bad’ definitions - seems to have succeeded in keeping this community from devolving into inefficacy or worse.
RELEVANCE/ACCREDITATION: In the world of the Internet, relevance and accreditation usually falls to a peer produced rating system. This is best exemplified by google. The engine treats links from other websites pointing to a given website as votes of confidence. Whenever someone who authors a website links it to someone else’s page, that person has stated quite explicitly that the linked page is worth a visit. According to Benkler, the great thing about accreditation on the Internet is that there is a moderation setup designed to give many users a small amount of power.
VALUE-ADDED DISTRIBUTION: Benkler gives an example of this by talking about Project Gutenberg which scans in books to create an online library. They then distribute the proof reading which works much better than making one person responsible for an entire book. People are able to proof a few pages at a time, rather than being responsible for an entire book.
SHARING OF PROCESSING, STORAGE, AND COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORMS: There are also participants in this online collaboration who instead, share their material goods that they privately own, such as computer computation, storage, and communications capacity. An example of this is SETI@home. When a person signs up for this program, they allow their personal computer to be used while it is idle in order to perform calculations for a larger project. Benkler goes on to state that what is truly unique about peer to peer networks as a signal of what is to come is the fact that with ridiculously low financial investment, a few teenagers were able to write software and protocols that allowed tens of millions of computer users around the world to cooperate in producing the most efficient and robust fils storage and retrieval system in the world. When Benkler makes this statement it is in reference to peer to peer file sharing services such as Gnutella and KaZaa. The network component owned by any single music service cannot match the collective storage and retrieval capabilities of the universe of users’ hard drives and network connections. Benkler goes on to discuss other new developments in the internet world such as Skype, an internet telephone utility that allows owners of computers to have voice conversations with each other over the internet for free. It is important to understand that nonmarket production in general and peer production in particular are phenomena of much wider application than free software and exist in important ways throughout the networked information economy. Benkler goes on to discuss the other ways in which these unique aspects of the internet are used, and what is at risk with current/future law, later on in his book.
[edit] Chapter 4: The Economics of Social Production
Benkler starts off this chapter by stating three questions that arise from an economic perspective when given the results discussed in the last chapter. 1) Why do people participate? 2) Why now and where here? 3) Is it efficient to have all of these people sharing their computers and donating all their time and creative effort? He answers this throughout the entire chapter, however begins with an overall encompassing answer stating “it is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market and proprietary relations - through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action - that creates the opportunities for great autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps a more equitable global community.”
MOTIVATION: Benkler states that we live our lives in diverse social frames ant that money has a complex relationship within these; sometimes it adds to the motivation and other times it detracts. Take for example an altruistic blood procurement system. This is considered both more ethical and more efficient than a market system. According to psychologist Edward Deci extrinsic motivations often times crowd out intrinsic motivation because they either impair self determination or they impair self esteem. Under some circumstances, adding money for an activity previously undertaken without price compensation reduces, rather than increases, the level of activity. Benkler proposes that these ideas regarding motivation should be superimposed upon the analysis of the last chapter.
SOCIAL PRODUCTION: FEASIBILITY CONDITIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL FORM: With the computer, individual users possess and control the physical capital necessary to make effective the human capacities they uniquely possess. The number of people who can participate in a project is inversely related to the size of the smallest contribution necessary to produce a usable module. Benkler defines modularity as a property of a project that describes the extent to which it ca be broken down into smaller components (modules) that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole. Thus, Benkler goes on to explain that the internet has allowed for a huge amount of participation due to the small size of each individual module.
TRANSACTION COSTS AND EFFICIENCY: Benkler goes on to state that the rest of the book will be dedicated to evaluating why and to what extent a commons based sector is desirable from perspectives of freedom and justice. It is sated that there ate two scare resources: 1) Human creativity, time and attention 2) The computation and communications resources used in information production and exchange
Benkler goes on to state that the current market based system is inefficient with the rigidities associated with collecting and comprehending bids from individuals through market systems. The system that emerges from the internet gets rid of these problems by comparison to a system in which, once an individual self-identifies for a task, he or she can then undertake it without permission, contract or instruction from another. The cost advantage of sharing as a transactional framework relative to the price system increases linearly with the number of transactions necessary to acquire the level of resources necessary for an operation. Benkler then applies this statement to some of the other modes of information resources mentioned in previous chapters such as SETI@home. It is better to allow people to share their computer space rather than pay them for it because in the right social context, fewer owners will be willing to sell their excess capacity cheaply than they will be willing to give it away for free. He also states that the transaction costs of selling would be higher than those of sharing.
THE EMERGENCE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION IN THE DIGITALLY NETWORKED ENVIRONMENT: This section begins with the question: Why do we, despite the ubiquity of social production, generally ignore it as an economic phenomenon and why might we now reconsider its importance? The answer to this question is that it isn’t always ignored. However when the use of larger scale physical capital goods is a threshold requirement of effective action, it is much more difficult to rely on decentralized sharing as a standard modality of production. However, this is about to change. Goods, services and resources that in the industrial stage of the information economy required large-scale concentrated capital in investment to provision, are now subject to computers and the internet that can make sharing a better way of achieving the same results than can states or markets.
THE RELATIVE ECONOMIC ROLE OF SHARING CHANGES WITH TECHNOLOGY: So where does all of this sharing come from? Has humanity changed its ways and now sees the light of being kind to one another? Benkler does not propose this, but rather puts forth the idea that technology does not determine the level of sharing but rather sets the threshold constraints on the effective domain of sharing as a modality of economic production.
THE INTERFACE OF SOCIAL PRODUCTION AND MARKET-BASED BUSINESSES: Benkler states that as this new commons-based means of production comes about, the former industrial market world can merge with it. A manager must be able to identify patterns that emerge in the community and inspire trust that they are correctly judging the patterns that are valuable from the perspective of the users, not only the enterprise, so that the users in fact coalesce around and extend these patterns. In this way, large scale enterprises like Wikipedia can begin to form and thrive.
[edit] Chapter 5: Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law
The networked information economy helps increase individual autonomy. 1) It increases the range and diversity of things that individuals can do for and by themselves by lifting some constraints that typify the industrial information economy such as material, tools, or platforms. 2) It provides nonproprietary alternative sources of communications capacity and information. That is, it helps free individuals from the act of the owners of the facility that they need for communications. 3) It increases the range and diversity of information available to individual. It makes individuals become participants rather than merely passive consumers like what they were in television culture—the epitome of the industrial information economy. Freedom to do more for oneself, by oneself, and with others
Benkler proposes that the technology of information era offers individual the new set of feasible options. He gives examples of the technology of “a simple camcorder and tripod, and widely available film and image generation and editing software on his computer” that enables Rory Cejas to make The Jedi Saga, a twenty-minute film, rather than passively sit in the theatre or in front of the television and watch Starwars. This exemplifies the way an individual is changing from being a couch potato to an active film maker with the aid of the networked information technology.
Also, Banker states that the shift from television culture is symbolized by the “massive multiplayer online game” that brings about the massive collaboration of thousands of people throughout the world in the persistent game environment. Moreover, some of these games such as “Second Life,” a newer game by Linden Labs, give players freedom to generate their own world by offering only tools and courses in basic programming skills. In this new world, individuals are truly the active creators rather than passive receptacle who are limited to finished goods.
In fact, this aforementioned shift in the entertainment domain is representative of peer production in particular. According to Benkler, peer-production is the platform where people with common interest turn to a network to find a community of peers who are willing to make that wish come true. For example, people who participate in wring free software development project, in Wikipedia, in the Open Directory Project, etc.
Benkler believes that the networked information culture is reducing the agency imposed by the industrial economy. The culture of industrial economy is no more than typical of welfare economies where people are treated merely according to production and demand functions. It also goes hand in hand with industrial Taylorism that abstracts all the motions and actions in the systems and renders employees solely replaceable parts of the industries.
While people in the industrial economy live most of their lives within hierarchical relation of production or just as consumers, a “third way,” presented in Michael Piore and Charles Sabel’s Second Industrial Divide and Roberto Mangabeira Unger’s False Necessity, indicates the emergence of “radically decentralized, nonmarket production” as a new outlet for the constraining roles of employees and consumers. In the new era, with regard to culture, entertainment, and information, users are more engaged participants, sometimes as consumers and sometime as producers.
The networked economy guarantees an environment with less control and more facilitating actions. It gives individuals freedom to act effectively without asking for permission from anyone. It decreases their dependence on monetary motivations as drivers of production. It allows them to be plan, to achieve their goal and most of all to be the authors of their lives. Autonomy, property, and commons
Benkler proposes that property is usually thought to boost individual freedom in the sense that it 1) provides security of material context—it ensures people that their resources will be available to them to use whenever they want—and 2) together with markets, they provide greater freedom of action for individual owner.
Commons are an alternative form of institutional space. It also offers freedom of action and security of resource availability, both of which prosper autonomy, but in a very different pattern from in the property-based markets. What separates commons from property is that with commons “no actor is empowered by law to act upon another as an object of his or her will,” which implies “greater freedom.”
In addition, in the context of abstract materials such as information, knowledge, and culture, the commons provides even greater security of context than with the material resources such as parks or sidewalks. Moreover, peer production, distributed computation, wireless communication, and the networked information economy ensure individuals of the adequate, diverse, and expansive resources. Autonomy and the information environment
Benkler makes a point that “the structure of our information environment if constitutive of our autonomy, not only functionally significant to it.” He argues that the information environment fulfils the fundamental requirement of self-direction which, he states, is the capacity 1) to perceive the state of the world, 2) to conceive of available options for action, 3) to connect actions to consequences, 4) to evaluate alternative outcomes, and 5) to decide upon and pursue an action accordingly. That is, the diversity and the vast amount of information render the providers who may try to manipulate the users through their goods unable to shape the individual’s choices.
After all, this reflects the autonomy of the users. However, there are two main effects that information law can have on personal autonomy: 1) the law that reduces the number of options available or in other words makes a person susceptible to the control of another, for example, government regulation of the press; 2) the law that diminishes the variety of options open to the society.
Autonomy, mass media, and non-market information producers
Benkler believes that the networked information economy supports autonomy by significantly diversifying the information available to individuals. Producers of information, knowledge, and culture are now responsive to a multitude of motivations apart from profit-making business. Moreover, it soothes the economic difficulties—the high cost of communication as well as production and the entry barriers in business—which constrain the individual’s capacity to act freely. It also elicits the preference of each individual that was suppressed by the rule of majority during the mass-media era.
Nevertheless, there are two objections to the networked information economy: “quality and cacophony.” In other words, there is some fear of information overload, or the Babel objection, and the low quality production that may arise from this loosely regulated network, especially the internet. In order to respond to the critique, Benkler points out that the variety of motivations, not solely profit-maximizing prospect, and modalities, compared to those in the industrial economy, answer the problem of quality. For the Babel objection, he resorts to the help of filtration, accreditation, and the editorial function, all of which are themselves information goods that can be produced on a commons-based, non-market model
All in all, the emergence of the networked economy and the addendum of information environment allow individuals to do more for and by themselves, and to coordinate with others. We are shifting to more flexible, self authored roles of users and peer participants in cooperative community by providing commons and a variety of available choices. People can now be authors of their own lives. Also, small groups of people can now produce or shape information, knowledge, and culture in styles that can never be done before in the mass-media environment.
[edit] Chapter 6: Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media
Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the platform of the public sphere, defined as “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,” was dominated by mass media—print, radio, and television. In fact, in either democratic or authoritarian community, no public sphere is built on a platform that is distributed and independent of both government control and market demands. However, the internet and the networked information economy have come to promise an alternative to the previous public sphere that inverts the mass-media model. Mass media which prevailed during the twentieth century was comprised of a particular technical architecture, a particular economic cost structure, and a set of cultural practices typified by consumption of “finished goods.” Its structure resulted in a relatively controlled public sphere.
According to Benkler, the structure of mass media did not support the participatory environment, but instead rendered people merely recipients. In other words, there were only one-way channels for sending information from the “core” the “edges” of the structure without interactive feedback from the “edges” to the “core” or even among the “end points.” Also, communication between the “ends points” was still local or one-to-one such as telephone which was significantly inferior to the mass media. Then, here comes the internet. It changes the cultural practice of public communication such that people can participate more than receive what “the media” offers as “finished goods.”
Design Characteristics of a communication platform for a liberal public platform or a liberal public sphere
Liberal public platform/sphere is where people from all over can be citizens of the same democratic polity rather than merely passive subjects of an authority. It is where people speak up their opinions and also listen to other people’s. Here are the characteristics that Benkler deems are essential for democratic environment:
1) Universal Intake: Any system that respects each subject for political action and let he or she have a say to decide what the government should do. 2) Filtering for Potential Political Relevance: In a system, there should be a filtration system that separates out the concerns from the universal intake that are plausible in the domain of organized political action. 3) Filtering for Accreditation: Accreditation, different from relevance, requires creditability. Especially in the political discourse, accreditation is essential to convince a large number of people to consent to a certain opinion. Normally, journalism and NGOs are the institutions that build the accreditation and relevance of a matter in public sphere. That is, filters for both relevance and accreditation are useful for judging any opinion that may lead to a political action. 4) Synthesis of “Public Opinion”: A system that synthesizes the clusters of individual opinion articulated to form public opinions rather than just private opinions that initiate no further action. 5) Independence from Government Control: In the public sphere, the government should act a participant rather than a controller of the conversation. The Emergence of the Commercial Mass-Media Platform for the Public Sphere
Throughout the twentieth century, mass media, in from of both print and electronics, played critical roles as “the forth estate.” The media are seen as a watchdog over the government processes and as a platform that turns public opinions to political statements. However, according to Benkler, this claim is derided because of its one-way culture such as TV culture, and also challenged by the emergence of the networked public sphere.
Also, the mass media such as a commercial press have always been sensitive to the conditions of the marketplace, the start-up cost, and the economies of scale of the mechanical press, especially the local commercial one that carried highly political news and opinion. Later, radio and television were introduced also as the basic centralized communications model of mass media but were subject to more control. In all, the mass media—printed media, radio, television, or cable—were regulated by a tiny number of commercial entities as the basic advertiser-supported model.
Basic Critiques of Mass Media
In authoritarian countries, the model of “endpoint-reception” of the mass media system makes it simple to regulate by controlling the core. In liberal democracies, some basic architectural and cost characteristics limit the capacity of the mass media. Benkler elaborates on the following three primary critiques of the commercial media: 1) The intake has been to limited because some sources are far from concerns and thus fail to buy their way to public attention; 2) The owners of the mass media have too much power; and 3) The media in order to satisfy the sponsors has to lead the programs away from politically challenging contents to the titillating and the soothing. This can be viewed as the tension between business interests and journalistic ethics. However, there are three primary defenses: 1) the commercial media, unlike the state-owned media in authoritarian countries, is independent from government or influential parties; 2) their professionalism enables the media to perform the role of the watchdog in complex societies; and 3) their ubiquity makes the media capable of filtering and accrediting statements in public sphere.
Mass Media as a Platform for the Public Sphere
First of all, as a platform for the public sphere, the mass media can cost information loss at the intake stage as a result of the difference between the number of intakes and the diversity of human opinions. Second, the finished-goods style of the mass-media products may cause the constraints on the feedback from the people to the center. Third, the loosely defined audience affects the filtering and synthesis functions of the mass media. Fourth, the high cost of organizing the media forced it to sell attention of large audience to commercial advertisers.
Media Concentration: The Power of Ownership and Money
Their commercialism damages their capacity to provide a effective platform for public sphere due to the following reasons: 1) The need of advertiser-supported media to achieve the largest audience possible leads them to focus on lowest-common-denominator programming and materials; 2) Their tendency to avoid controversial material for fear of offending the audience; and 3) The contradiction between journalistic ethic and business renders the media short of some serious analysis of the society. All in all, advertiser-supported media are sensitive to the number of the audience rather than the intensity of their satisfaction.
Here comes the internet, the network that can complement the mass media and fix the weaknesses. Its non-market model enables it to radically distribute production of information and culture. Also, greater access and collaborative systems of internet make it the better platform for public sphere.
[edit] Chapter 7: Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of Networked Public Sphere
The difference between the networked information economy and the mass media, the mainstream during the twentieth century, are 1) network architecture [hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links => multidirectional connections among all nodes] and 2) the cost of becoming a speaker [no communication costs/barriers].
Quantitative Changes 1.Reaching more people 2.Cost less to communicate and collaborate
Qualitative Changes 1.Passive listeners/listeners => active speakers/participants [Web sites {Slashdot}, blogs] 2.Affects the structures of intakes of observations and views 3.Affects how positions are formed/polarized 4.May be converted to political positions The Democratizing Effect of the Internet as seen from the perspective of the mid-1990s by the U.S.
From the definition from the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU: there are two types of effect of the networked environment: 1.From the readers’ perspective: the variety of human expression available to everyone with the access to the internet 2.Anyone can be a publisher, not only government and commercial entities who are the speakers of the mass-media environments
Basic Tools of Networked Communication
E-mail Cheap, easy to use Large amount of commercial spam makes indiscriminate e-mail distribution a relatively poor mechanism for being heard. On the other hand, e-mails to small groups that have the same interest provide a good mechanism for communicating observations, ideas, and opinions. Mailing lists are stable and self-selecting.
World Wide Web Basic static Web pages to blogs Platforms for large-scale conversations like Slashdot Individual’s basic “broadcast” medium Searchable database of information, observations, and opinions, available at low cost for anyone
Web log/Blog As media for the political public sphere -“writable webs” can be modified from anywhere with a networked computer and the results are immediately available…the evolution of a “journal-style Web page” -Readers/users can write to the blog Other large-scale, collaborative-content production systems Slashdot or Wikipedia -Intended for, and used by very large groups, so incorporate social software solutions to avoid deterioration into chaos—peer review, structured posting privileges, reputation systems, etc… -Collaborative authorship and salient opinions that “stick” to each other All these Web-based tools are liking, quotation, and presentation in the hypertext markup language (HTML) that makes referencing easy. Different from the mass-media culture where sending a five-hundred-page report to millions of users is inconvenient and costly.
The culture is oriented toward “see for yourself.” You can trust the underlying sources. The United States has remained mostly PC-based networked system, whereas in Europe and Asia, there has been more growth in handheld devices, primarily mobile phones. Networked Information economy meets the public sphere
Networked systems allow people to see themselves as potential contributors to public discourse and as potential actors in political areas rather than passive recipients of mediated information.
There will be two case studies to describe the social and economic practices that construct the public sphere, which is different from the mass-media model.
Sinclair Broadcasting and the 2004 U.S. presidential election How networked public sphere allows individuals to monitors and disrupt the use of mass-media power, and organize for political action. The existence of radically decentralized outlets for individuals and groups can provide a check on the excessive power that media owners were able to exercise in the industrial information economy. -Publicly traded firm -Each about 1/4 of US household -Key markets in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa (swing states) -Informed its staff and station that “Stolen Honor: The Wound” to be aired Kerry’s Vietnam service -Washington report fired for calling it “blatant political propaganda” -“Berlusconi effect” -Its plan broke on Saturday, Oct 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times -“Official” responses emerge in the Democratic Party…whether the program is an undeclared “in-kind” contribution to the Bush campaign. -The Democratic National Committee (FEC) files a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) -17 democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) -Neither FEC nor FCC responses -Blogosphere jump in (Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo.com, Chris Bower on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com). Nick Davis stated a Web site, BoycottSBG.com, on which he posted the basic idea that a concerted boycott of local advertisers was the way to go, while another website, stopsinclair.org, began pushing for a petition …) -Pushback to boycotters by company: Sinclair affiliates were threatening advertisers who cancelled ads with legal action, and called for volunteer lawyers to help respond. bloggers offer info, links to esgs.. -Anonymous blogger: “Contai.. their advertisers!” -Boycott DB created, Simple form for reaching advertisers -Oct 15, Advertisers pull ads -Oct 15, Lehman Brothers issued a research report that downgraded the expected twelve-month outlook for the price of Sinclair stock, citing concerns about loss of advertiser revenue and risk of tighter regulation. -Oct 18, the company’s stock price dropped by 8 percent, and further 6 percent the following morning -Sinclair announced that it would not show Stolen Honor, cries “Uncle.” And the day after that, stock bounced back to Oct 15.
- While this does not prove that the Web-organized, blog-driven and –facilitated boycott was the determining factor, as compared to fears of formal regulatory action, the timing strongly suggests that the efficacy of the boycott played a very significant role.
The new, networked-based media can exert a significant counterforce Internal dynamics of the networked public sphere
Filtering and synthesis occurred through discussion, trial, and error. It was probably the analysis’s report from Lehman, not the media that was the most immediate “transmission mechanism” of their effect.
Mass media are easier to control…license, not too many, comparatively slow, Internet/Networks -Speed of organization -A lot of activists who don’t have to know each other -Counterforce to msm -Highly decentralized campaign -Long tail distribution
Diebold Election Systems
How the networked public sphere allows individuals and groups of intense political engagement to report, comment, and play the role of traditionally assigned to the press in observing, analyzing, and creating political salience for matters of public interest. The generative capacity of the networked public sphere
Individuals as potential investigators and commentators, as active participants in defining the agenda and debating action in the public sphere How it allows large numbers of people to participate in a peer-production enterprise of new gathering, analysis, and distribution.
Serious public discussion that led to public action -Manufactures of electronic voting machines and a subsidiary of one of the most foremost ATM manufactures in the world, more than $2 billion a year in revenue -Sell voting machines to States + Countries -Electronic voting machines were first used to a substantial degree in the US in the Nov 2002 elections. -Computer scientists worry about security, captive, -This lack of access was one of the main objections computer scientists raised about electronic voting. They argued that electronic voting is inherently undemocratic because, when a company’s software cannot be viewed by the public, voters have no way to ensure that it works properly -Few people knew how to access Diebold’s source code. As Joe Richardson, a spokesperson for Diebold explained, “We don’t feel it’s necessary to turn [the source code] over to everyone who asks to see it because it is proprietary.” -A glitch that would allow holders of a certain “smart card” to vote as many times as they liked. As Avi Rubin, the principal researcher, explained, “We found some stunning, stunning flaws.” -NO mass-media reports inquiring into how secure and accurate voting machines were. NO mass-media outlet sough to go behind the claims of the manufacturers about their machines, to inquire into their security or the integrity of their tallying and transmission mechanisms against vote tampering. -In late Jan 2003, Bev Harris, activist, “comes across” Diebold documents outline: specifications for, and the actual code of, Diebold’s machines and vote-tallying system. -Published 2 initial journalistic accounts on an online journal Scoop.com (New Zealand) + Publish them online How the networked information economy can use peer production to play the role of watchdog -Students @ Swarthmore, Harvard, etc, republish them -Diebold: send out C+Ds to: B. Harris, colleges, etc. -Legal strategy: use DMCA – tell intermediaries to take down the file for face liability under © violation -Fair use pushback by students: 1) Purpose and character of the use 2) Nature of the work 3) Amount of the stuff used 4) Market Finally, the students won!
Internet/Networks Info “came” from the Net (distinguishes Sinclair/Diebold) Critiques of these democratizing effects:
1.The Babel Objection/Information Overload When everyone can speak, who will listen to whom, and how the question will be decided. Therefore, according to Noam’s prediction, money would reemerge as a major determinant of the capacity to be heard. Sunstein’s theory, discourse would be fragmented and without the mass-media, there would be no public agenda. Individuals would be clusters of self-reinforcing, self-referential discussion groups. Fragmentation, polarization, and money would be a major determinant of the capacity to be heard. and the loss of political community
In fact, a tiny number of sites are highly linked and the vast majority of “speakers” are not heard. A Web page will be linked to by others and the distribution of that probability turns out to be highly skewed. That is, there is a tiny probability that any given Web site will be liked to by a huge number of people. => The internet use patterns solve the problem of discourse fragmentation. The Vast majority of users see the same sites and this [heterogeneous viewpoints] also solves the polarization problem.
We are seeing a newly shaped information environment, where indeed few are read by many, but clusters of moderately read sites provide platforms for vastly greater numbers of speakers than were heard in the mass-media environment.
Money issue: recall that the low cost of computers and the open-ended architecture of the Internet protocol are the core enabling facts that have allowed us to transition from the mass-media model to the networked information model. The basic characteristic that typifies the networked information economy is the relatively large role of nonproprietary, nonmarket production. The primary scarce resource is instead user time and attention.
2.Centralization of the Internet: not to be as egalitarian or distributed as the 1990s conception had suggested. There are few speakers to which most people listen. =>the concentration concern, few speakers just as in the mass-media environment There is no central set of speakers to whom most people listen are solved in much the same way that the mass-media model deals with the factual diversity of information, opinions, and observations in large societies—by consigning them to public oblivion. But more dynamic, peer input matters, low…
3.Centralization of commercial mass media to the Fourth Estate function Neil Netanel: the press is often described as fulfilling “the watchdog function.” Individuals and collections of volunteers talking to each other may be nice, but they cannot seriously replace well-funded, economically and politically powerful media.
He emphasizes that the networked public sphere cannot investigate as deeply or create the public salience that the mass-media can.
=>the Diebold story =>Peer production matters =>Radically distributes method of investigation, analysis, distribution, and resistance to suppression: the materials made available on a “see for yourself” and “come analyze this and share your insights” model, the distribution by students, and the fallback option when their server was shut down of replication around the network.
4.Authoritarian countries can use filtering and monitoring to squelch Internet
It’s harder for them to control the internet than the mass media and also the internet can give them many more useful things. That is, most countries are not willing to forgo the benefits of connectivity to maintain their control.
Iran and China have a density of Internet users of about one in sixteen. Burma’s negligible level of Internet availability is a compound effect of low GDP per capita and government policies.
The case of Radio B92 in Yugoslavia as an independent radio station founded in 1989…was banned twice after the NATO bombing of Belgrade, however, the station continued to produce programming, and distributed it over the Internet from a server based in Amsterdam.
Shutting down a broadcast station is simple but it is much harder to shut down all connections from all reporters to a server and from the server back into the country wherever a computer exists.
However, a regime is willing and able to limit its population’s access to the Internet sufficiently. China, the second-largest population of Internet users in the world, monopolizes all Internet connections going into and out of the country.
5.Digital divide: access to its tools is skewed in favor of those who already are well-off in society—wealth, race, and skills.
Computers are becoming cheaper and more widely available in public libraries and school.
Computer literacy and skills are more widely distributed than the skills and instruments of mass-media production.
- the democratizing effects of the Internet must be compared to democracy in the context of mass media, not in the context of an idealized utopia.
[edit] Chapter 8: Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical
How culture is produced is an essential ingredient in structuring how freedom and justice are perceived, conceived, and pursued. We are now seeing the possibility of an emergence of a new popular culture produced on the folk-culture model and inhabited actively, rather than passively, by the masses. Benkler begins this chapter by making three major statements.
1) Claims that the modalities of cultural production and exchange are a proper subject for normative evaluation within a broad range of liberal political theory. 2) Cultural production in the form of the networked information economy offers individuals a greater participatory role in making the culture they occupy and makes the culture more transparent to its inhabitants. 3) The kind of open participatory transparent folk culture that is emerging in the networked environment is normatively more attractive than was the industrial cultural production system that was typified by Hollywood and the recording industry.
CULTURAL FREEDOM IN LIBERAL POLITICAL THEORY: In today’s world culture has been incorporated into political theory as the central part of the critique of liberalism. For example, it is difficult to defend respect for autonomous choices as a respect for an individual’s will when an objective observer is able to point to a social process (such as culture acclimation) acting upon the individual and causing that individual to hold that particular will. In liberal democracy there is a need for some cultural coherence. Benkler sees this as a precondition to becoming liberal citizens. It allows one to talk and defend their claim in terms without which there can be no liberal conversation. What is great about the internet is that it has a large capability of calling into question background knowledge, at which point it no longer is background knowledge. Background knowledge is defied as knowledge we make use of without awareness of the fact that it could be false. When it becomes challenged then it disintegrates into background modality. In this sense, culture is revisable through critical examination.
THE TRANSPARENCY OF INTERNET CULTURE: Benkler begins with a description of Google to prove his point regarding transparency. Google uses a radically decentralized mechanism for assigning relevance. A google search of Barbie is given as an example of the transparency that results from the decentralized mechanism of relevance. A google search of Barbie results in several widely varied sites. The official site comes up, along with sites regarding the feminist perspective of Barbie’s as well as a site called “suicide bomber Barbie”. All of these sites reflect different ideas, from political to gender studies, to the typical commercial ideas. Benkler suggests that the transparency does not force the little girl who is looking up Barbie to choose one meaning or the other. However, it does render transparent that Barbie can have multiple meanings and that choosing that meaning can be important matter of political concern for some people. The idea of Barbie is then extended into encyclopedia analysis by comparing the wikipedia entry to that of the Britannica entry. The wikipedia entry shows how the entry altered over time. The software allows any reader to look at prior versions of the definition, to compare specific versions, and to read the ‘talk’ pages - the pages where the participants discuss their definition and their thoughts about it. The Britannica entry on the other hand is one experts idea about what Barbie is, and is very straightforward. The wikipedia entry is a more eclectic compilation of all the different perspectives that people now take on Barbie and how that idea has evolved over time.
People engage in conversations with each other precisely to understand themselves in the world, their relationship to others and what makes them like and unlike those others. There is a clear distinction between market and nonmarket-based activities. Britannica has built its reputation on delivery of the knowledge and opinions of those in positions to claim authority in the name of culture and competence. This nonmarket wikipedia will not displace the encyclopedia market, according to Benkler, but rather present an alternative path for cultural conversation. This cultural conversation, by it’s very nature, increases the transparency of culture to its inhabitants.
The wikipedia example makes clear two important concepts: 1) The degree of self consciousness that is feasible with open conversation of culture 2) The degree to which the culture is writable and to which individuals can participate in mixing and matching and making their own emphases for themselves and for others on a set of existing symbols This potential of the emerging openness of the internet has been referred to by some as semiotic democracy.
THE PLASTICITY OF INTERNET CULTURE: THE FUTURE OF HIGH PRODUCTION VALUE FOLK CULTURE: There are now new programs that make it much easier for people to participate in the process of making music, videos and art. Benkler concedes that not everyone is a Mel Gibson or a Frank Sinatra. However, he goes on to state that the practice of making cultural artifacts of all forms enables individuals in a society to be better readers, listeners, and viewers of professionally produced culture as well as contributors of our own statements into this mix of collective culture.
A PARTICIPATORY CULTURE: TOWARD POLICY: Benkler goes on to state two distinctive forms of purpose in regards to culture: 1) A concern for the degree of freedom individuals have to form and pursue a life plan and the degree of participation they can exercise in debating and determining collective action 2) The relative attractiveness of the 20th century industrial model of cultural production and what appears to be emerging as the networked model in the early 21st century rather than on the relationship of the latter to some theoretically defined culture Understanding cultural framework:
Benkler suggests that there are four aspects to this: 1) Participation in cultural discourse is intimately tied to individual self-expression. 2) Culture is more intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life tan political process and debates 3) Culture infuses thoughts at a wide level of consciousness 4) There is no point outside of culture in which we stand and decide
Benkler does not suggest that we want a bunch of people floating around disconnected from a culture. Rather, the ability to exchange ideas and adopt that which we find enabling does seem a good prospective to him.
[edit] Chapter 9: Justice and Development
Access to knowledge has become central to human development. With the internet and networked information economy, there is an opportunity like never before for improvement in the normative domain of justice as compared to what was possible with the industrial information economy. The networked information economy reduces both cost barriers and transactional barriers creating alternative paths. Benkler goes one step further than just making these observations, but goes on to state that a system that relies too heavily on proprietary approaches to information production is not just inefficient, but unjust.
LIBERAL THEORIES OF JUSTICE AND THE NETWORKED INFORMATION ECONOMY: Benkler argues that the networked information economy improves justice from the perspective of every single justice theory. Benkler brings back his encyclopedia analysis saying that there is no loss in social surplus when non-market entities enter into something where the industrial market has been established AND that this social surplus is distributed more equally so that it helps the poor. This equality of opportunity to act in the face of unequal endowment is something that Benkler feels is central to all liberal theories of justice.
COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR HUMAN WELFARE AND DEVELOPMENT: Education is heavily dependent on access to materials and facilities for teaching. Economic growth has been understood to be centrally driven by innovation. Benkler states that the emergence of the networked information economy will feed both of these ideas making it possible for those not as well off to achieve the basic tools necessary to succeed.
INFORMATION EMBEDDED GOOS AND TOOLS, INFORMATION, AND KNOWLEDGE: Information embedded goods are now becoming more plentiful/cheaper because of some technological advance embedded in them/associated with their production. Free software also solves the problem of piracy of software. Information embedded tools: innovation is encumbered more than it is encouraged when the basic tools for innovation are proprietary. This property system gives owners of these tools proprietary rights to control innovation that relies on their tools. Information: Information is usually used to refer to a raw set of data, scientific reports, news, and factual reports. Knowledge: Knowledge is a set of cultural practices and capacities necessary for processing the information into either new statements in the information exchange, or more important in this context, for practical use of the information in appropriate ways to produce more desirable actions or outcomes from action.
The transfer of knowledge consists of two things: 1) The transfer of implicit knowledge, which resists codification into what would be here treated as information, such as training manuals 2) The transfer of formal instruction in an educational context (such as the MIT Open Courseware Initiative)
INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION OF HDA-RELATED INFORMATION INDUSTRIES: Benkler states that software is particularly well suited to having a greater role for commons based production. Exclusive proprietary producers now account for only one third of software related revenues within each market.
TOWARD ADOPTING COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT: Major world-improvement organizations such as the WTO and TRIPS think that strong protection is good, stronger protection better. Benkler states that the idea of international intellectual property is making it very difficult to reverse the trend toward increasing exclusive property right protections and thus making it impossible to take advantage of the new perhaps more just ways of producing things using the internet and the networked information economy. Despite these high intellectual property laws, Benkler proposes that commons based strategies can be implemented without changes in law. Some of these solutions are commons based and others are peer production solutions.
SOFTWARE: The baseline for Benkler’s point is software because it has already been proven to be quite successful with peer production systems. He says that free software can play two significant roles for developing nations. 1) It offers low cost access to high performing software for developing nations 2) There is the potential for participation in software markets based on human ability even without access to a stock of exclusive rights in existing software.
SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATION: Benkler states that the beginning of a nonproprietary strategy for scientific publication is beginning to emerge. There are different approaches from which this can occur. The first approach involves authoring and peer review with no expectation of pay and a salaried editorial staff. This is seen in organizations such as the Public Library of Science which derives its revenue from author payments, university memberships and philanthropic support. Another approach is for authors to collaborate and put their works up on websites dedicated to scientific works, such as ArXiv.org. This based on a peer review system of user comments. There is a small number of potential readers for such websites, but these readers have a high capacity to distinguish good arguments from bad ones. There have been attempts to make scientific text books, however these have mainly failed. The main constraint on this is the compilation requirements which constricts the modularity that these text-authoring projects adopt. The MIT open source initiative has been the most highly successful of these type of educational online attempts. They give anyone access to the teaching materials of some of the best minds in the world.
COMMONS-BASED RESEARCH FOR FOOD AND MEDICINES: Agriculture offers more immediate opportunities for improvement than does medicine because of the relatively larger role of public research which extends from national, international to academic. Developments such as crop improvement associations, seed certification improvements, and open-release policies that allow anyone to breed and sell certified seeds have allowed farmers to have access to the fruits of public research in a reasonably efficient way. An example of a success of things of this nature is the hybrid corn. What can be done to employ a commons based strategy to provide a foundation for research that will be focused on the food security of developing world populations? Alongside the national efforts that many are taking, there are two major paths:
1) Base it on existing institutes and programs that are cooperating to build a commons-based system, cleared of the barriers of patents and breeders rights 2) Base it on the kind of loose affiliation of university scientists, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals
The Public Intellectual Property Right for Agriculture was founded on the idea that some people, such as university scientists, are not driven by a profit motive, and so it allows them to collaborate. However, when they did discover helpful things, such as rice that implements vitamin A supplements, it was found that it had already been patented in over 60 countries.
The Generation Challenge Program is attempting to develop Web-based interfaces that share their data and computational resources. Another program that is attempting to create a commons-based program s called BIOS. BIOS is based on the idea that much of contemporary agricultural research depends on access to tools and enabling technologies. An example of this would be mechanisms to identify genes or for transferring them into target plants. In very simplistic terms, this means that anyone who builds upon the contributions of other must contribute improvements back to all of the other participants in the program. This allows for for information to be transferred into other areas of innovation at the very heart of what makes for human ability such as the ability for all to feed themselves. These ideas challenge the conventional wisdom that ever increasing intellectual property rights are necessary to secure greater investment in research.
ACCESS TO MEDICINES: COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH: Death is increasingly becoming a consequence of poverty. Benkler state that if there is immorality to be found then it is in the legal and policy system that relies heavily on the patent system to induce drug discovery and development and then does not fund adequately the biomedical research to solve problems that cannot be solved by relying solely on market pull, such as illnesses that only afflict third world countries and promise no economic return. Universities have two complementary paths: 1) Leveraging existing university patent portfolios 2) Constructing collaboration platforms to allow scientists to engage in peer production, cross cutting the traditional grant-funded lab, and aiming toward research into diseases that do not exercise a market pull on the biomedical research system
Leveraging University Patents: Benkler uses an example from Yale University which a company in India took a patent of a medicine created at yale and made it alot cheaper to produce so that it would actually be plausible to distribute to people who really needed the medication. There are complex problems that remain even if universities made the change. If an institutional interface between universities and the pharmaceutical industry was designed that would provide sustainable benefits for the developing world distribution of drugs and for research opportunities into developing world diseases. There are two barriers to this. 1) Distribution 2) Research that requires access to tools Benkler suggests that in exchange for access to university patents, the pharmaceutical licenses can agree not to assert any of their own rights in drugs that require a university license against generics manufacturers who make generic versions of those drugs purely for distribution in low and middle income countries. This won’t solve all of the problems (such as delivery) but it could help alot in his argument and be better than it is at the current moment.
NONPROFIT RESEARCH: Things like the Bill Gates independent research foundation are what Benkler suggests. However, this model is new and has not yet had enough time to mature and provide measurable success.
PEER PRODUCTION OF DRUG RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT: While it may be difficult to and too expensive to have a big revolution on the peer production scale in regards to medicine, this may prove to be wrong with developing technologies. An example of this would be the increasing portions of biomedical research that are done through modeling, computer simulation and data analysis. The best current example of this working is bioinformatics, a movement aimed at developing the tools in an open-source model, and in providing access to these tools and the outputs on a free and open basis. A more complex problem is building wet-lab science on a peer production basis. Access to laboratories is limited. However, Benkler goes on to state that there are machines that are redundantly provisioned in laboratories and thus have downtime. There are also postdoctoral fellows in labs with downtime. If these groups of people are given an internet basis upon which to collaborate with new information, great things could happen.
COMMONS-BASED STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPMENT: CONCLUSION: When individuals are allowed to collaborate freely, free from the constraints of proprietary endowment, there is a flourishing of individual action and informal association which can emerge as a new global mover. This allows for people to act in response to all of their motivations. This offers a new path, alongside that of the formal market, for achieving definable and significant improvements in human development throughout the world. This, says Benkler, is where freedom and justice coincide.
[edit] Chapter 10: Social Ties: Networking Together
There are a lot of concerns that the networked information economy will weaken social ties and deteriorate social relations. In fact, the most recent research suggests that as complex as they are, these effects do not break down but instead improve the world of television and telephone that concern with social relations.
The two effects, according to Benkler, are: 1) The thickening of preexisting relations with family, friends, and neighbors and the loosening of the hierarchical aspects of these relationships; 2) The greater scope and more fluidity of loose relationships.
From “Virtual Communities” to Fear of Disintegration
The “Virtual Communities” was based on Rheingold’s own experience in the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link). It was the large-scale social interaction among people who started out as strangers but later became a community. This points out that internet, overcoming industrial mass-mediated society, allows them to connect in spite of their physical distance. However, some criticism suggests that internet will replace strong ties in real world with weak ties in virtual world by taking away time and forming the thinner and less meaningful relationships. In fact, as Amitai Etzioni noted, the findings were that “Internet users spent less time watching television and shopping.”
A More Positive Picture Emerges Over Time
The claim that Internet user often face with greater loneliness and depression map onto the fears that the electronic relationships 1) will not give people the connectedness as social beings, and 2) Internet will make people with social capital better off than people who lack it as well as it will lead to worse results in terms of political participation and the provisioning of local public goods than will face-to face interactions.
The responses to those concerns are: 1) there is no evidence that Internet will replace the direct human contact and so it will not deteriorate the real world relationship; and 2) the “nature” of individuals changes over time and we are seeing a shift from locally embedded, stable relations into networked relations that are more instrumental and fluid. Users Increase their Connections with Preexisting Relations
By the Internet, the close relationships are affected in a positive way. According to the study by Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman at Toronto suburb Nerville, Internet strengthens weak ties such that people that used high-speed internet connection recognize three times as many of their neighbors by name and talked with twice as many as those who were not wired. On the other hand, strong ties such that people actually visited their neighbors were associated with how long those people had lived in the neighborhood and the distance between them.
Networked Individuals
The normative question is not whether the on-line relationships can replace the real-world ones; instead it is how we understand the effect of the thickened network of communications with preexisting relations and the broader net of weak ties. The concern is of the decline of stable, nurturing, and embedding relations. However, the new network actually adds more relations to the preexisting ones. Also, it enables individuals to recognize their social relations in ways that fit them better. They can loosen hierarchical and stifling social bonds and fill in the gaps where the relations seem lacking. For example, text message among Japanese teenagers loosens the constraints of time, hierarchy, and respect, under which they live.
In other word, Internet is viewed as a new platform of bridging the “weak ties” as allowing people to transmit information across social network about available opportunity for interest- and practice-based social relations and resources. Internet as a Platform for Human Connection
Social relations need communications. As opposed to other media of the twentieth century such as television, radio, telephone, etc, Internet allows for more diverse types of communications—textual, aural, and visual communications. It fixes the problem of asynchronicity: e-mail, Web pages, but also allows temporal synchronicity: IM, online games. All in all, because of its flexibility, Internet supports a wide range of social relations.
The Emergence of Social Software
The possibility of large-scale, medium-scale, and small-scale communications enabled by Internet has led to a wide range of software designs and applications to facilitate types of communications such as WWW, e-mail. “[S]ocial software” such as blogs with opportunities to comment, Wikies, as well as social-norm-mediated Listservs or uses of the “cc” line in email, etc, has been introduced for the past two years to be a new space for group, as defined by Clay Shirky, “[l]arger than a dozen, smaller than a few hundred, where people can actually have these conversational forms that can’t be supported when you’re talking about tens of thousands or millions of users, at least in a single group.” The peer-production processes also offer a nonhierarchical and decentralized relationship. That is, it brings together otherwise unconnected individuals and replaces background or geographic proximity.
Internet and Human Community
To answer the question whether Internet facilitate the breakdown of community, the answer has been partly empirical and partly conceptual:
Empirically, with the Internet, we communicate more with the “core constituents of our organic communities—our family and our friends” and we somehow communicate more with our neighbors or other loosely affiliated or geographically remote people.
Conceptually, we are a networked society now. Internet has allowed us to connect one another in small and large groups. It does not replace preexisting relations but provide us stability of context and a greater degree of freedom from the hierarchy and social constraints.
[edit] Chapter 11: The Battle over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment
Between 1995 and 1998, America totally renovated its telecommunication law. For example, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that enacted in 1998 was longer than the entire Copyright Act. Also, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has played its part in treaties and concerns in the international trade regime.
The formal regulatory drive had been to increase the freedom of individuals to gain and assert exclusivity in resources. At the physical layer, broadband Internet had generated less competitive pressure and greater freedom to shape each person’s own networks. That freedom has been complemented by the copyright act such that the providers have to exercise greater control over the information flows. At the logical layer, anti circumvention provision and the efforts to rid peer-to-peer sharing have forced software and protocols to offer a more controlled environment. At the content layer, a series of institutional changes aimed at tightening exclusivity.
However, at each layer, there have been countervailing forces. At the physical layer, with the help of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s), the development of wireless devices was permitted such that the user-owned networks can offer an avenue for a common-based platform. At the logical layer, the centrality of open standard-setting processes and the free software provide the resistance. At the content layer, the cultural movements and the technical affordances are the most significant barrier.
That is, in order to imitate the twentieth-century model of industrial economy, law in the new technical-social context would have to shorten some of the most fundamental human motivations and practices of sharing and cooperation.
Institutional Ecology and Path Dependence
We are going through a moment of social-economic transformation from the industrial information era to the networked information one. Actually, according to Benkler, we are “in the midst of a significant perturbation of some sort.” That claim based on the following reasons: 1)Law affects people on micro- and macro-motivational levels. 2)The relationship between law ad human behavior is complex rather than “if law X then behavior Y.” 3)The effects also differ in different material and cultural contexts 4)The process of lawmaking is not exogenous to the effects of law on social relations and human behavior
As a result, there is path dependence in institutions and social organization. The term “institutional ecology” refers to this context-dependent and path-dependent process.
A Framework for Mapping the Institutional Ecology
Two examples can explain the levels at which law can operate to shape the use of information and its production and exchange.
First, there are four main points of failure that could have conspired to prevent the revelation of the Diebold files. 1)If the service provider—the college—had been a sole provider with no alternative physical transmission system 2)The existence of peer-to-peer networks that spread over the surface the physical networks and were used to distribute the materials made deleting them from the networks impossible 3)The original files that were not in text form could be read with free software available online 4)The access to the raw materials—the emails—was privileged under the fair-use doctrine. The second example highlights more of the levers open to legal manipulation. A Swedish video artist produced an audio version of Diana Toss and Lionel Richie’s love ballad, “Endless Love,” lip-synched to news footage of U.S. president George Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair. This story adds two components to the Diebold story. First, the quotation from video and music requires actual copying of the digital file. This means that access to the unencrypted bits is more important than in case of text. Second, it is unclear that using the entire song is a fair-use. The video combines “found materials” that were produced by others with one other and create a genuine product.
From the two stories, we can map the resources necessary for a creative communication. First, there is the “content” itself: existing information, cultural artifacts and communication, and knowledge structures. Second, there is machinery that manipulates those inputs to make genuinely new outputs. That is, these stories suggest that freedom to create and communicate requires use of a lot of things and relationships and this makes the institutional ecology of information production and exchange complex.
The Problem of Security
One of the primary concerns is that open wireless networks are available for criminal to hide their tracks. Another concern is that free and open-source software is available to anyone. This makes it easier for the attackers to find flaws and exploit them. It is almost impossible to disrupt local communications because the network is designed so that each router can find available neighbor to make contact with. All in all, just as the Internet makes it harder for the authoritarian regimes to control their people, it also makes it harder the control the openness and flexibility of this new networked environment.
[edit] Chapter 12: Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy
This chapter starts with a recapitulation of the thesis presented at the beginning of the book. Benkler states that due to the extreme fear of communism and a need for countries to distinguish themselves from that ideology, policy makers and their advisers came to believe that property in information and innovation was like property in wristwatches and automobiles.
Benkler feels that he has demonstrated throughout the book that patents on information impedes democratic societies and is unjust for the world as a whole. As technology has increased and processing, storage and information has become easier to maintain, non-proprietary models have become even more attractive and effective. New organizations that rely on peer production are proving that these theories can work in reality. In contrast to the communist theory, this networked information economy has actually increased individual autonomy, allowing people not only to perceive the world around them but to alter the perception of that world. The views of more individuals and communities can now be heard with the rise of internet technologies. In contrast to the critiques that the Internet would increase information overload and fragmentation, the Internet has proven to be a unique and wonderful combination of self-conscious peer-production efforts and emergent properties of large systems of human beings. Given the freedom to participate in making our own information environment, people are able to to avoid the Babel problem while concurrently not replicating the hierarchies of mass-mediated public spheres.
The Internet also allows people not only to ‘occupy’ culture but also to interpret our culture as it becomes more transparent and thus contribute to that culture a unique interpretation.
The sky is the limit with this new mode of information creation and communication. Justice throughout the world can be served as more and more people have equal access to information, knowledge, education, and medicine. However, if patents continue to maintain their steady role over society, a problem can and will develop and the freedom that the Internet could contribute to the world will be contained. With this new Internet will come an upset. It will result in redistribution of wealth and power. This upset has resulted in and will result in battles over the organization and legal capabilities of the physical components of the digitally networked environment. In regards to open-source development, both the law and society have been fairly open to allowing this to flourish. An example of this would be the open-source software. However, on the content layer, in regards to the universe of existing information, knowledge, and culture, there is a counter-force between the law and the culture of society. As the law tightens the control of exclusive rights, social trends push towards a networked information economy in which knowledge, information, and art is all shared.
One problem with the legal and political society that is developing is the pressures upon these facets of government to maintain proprietary business. Benkler states that it is hard to predict whether a successful sustained effort on the part of the industrial information economy producers will succeed in flipping those in favor of proprietary production. It is, however, beginning to become a significant social movement. The idea of a networked-information economy brings with it great promise but also great uncertainty. It has been seen in the software mode and in peer to peer file sharing, that such systems can exist in reality. However, there are other forces at work here too, such as businesses who inject corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks in order to discourage use, or the laws and regulations that are beginning to crack down on such emerging information production.
Benkler concludes his book with a statement of the utmost hope for the proliferation of democracy and freedom. By removing some of the transactional barriers to material opportunity, the state of human development can improve everywhere. A networked information economy contains within it the potential for better human welfare, development, and freedom.
[edit] Editions
- 1st: ISBN 0-300-11056-1
[edit] External links
- Author's website
- Wiki of the book, summaries, commentary, downloads
- Yale University Press' site for the book
- Audio from Benkler's talk, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", given at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law on 27 April 2006.
- Netizens awake, Paul Duguid, The Times Literary Supplement, July 07, 2006.
- outsidethemarket.info, a remix of an essay which is based on the book
- Searchable version available in multiple formats ( html, XML, opendocument ODF, pdf (landscape, portrait), plaintext, concordance ) SiSU
