Wealth of Networks review

“It seems passé today to speak of ‘the Internet revolution’. In some academic circles, it is positively naive. But it should not be.”

In Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law professor and Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, presents a comprehensive view of how information technology can create an informed public, an equitable world, and greater individual freedom.

Benkler looks at the impact of information technology in a broad swath of areas – business, law, individual freedom and political freedom. He provides a framework for understanding government policy implications for the future of information technology in issues like copyright.

This review will focus on Benkler’s argument that the new information technology can produce knowledge and culture through peer production and coordinated individual action driven by social values rather than market relationships based on money.

He writes that for 150 years modern democracies relied on an industrial information economy characterized by a consolidated production dominated by large vertically organized corporations. Like Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine Editor and author of The Long Tail, Benkler describes industrial information economy as characterized by one-way information flow, a hub and spoke structure with information emanating from print and broadcast sources to the public.

Modern information technology, computers and the internet, breaks the hub and spoke model. Information flows not only from media outlets out to an audience. Now it flows back from audience members and between audience members.

The industrial information economy was also characterized by the enormous capital required to produce and distribute newspapers and broadcast radio and TV signals. Newspapers require a major investment in staff and production facilities. The number of broadcast stations is limited by the Federal Communications Commissions.

But there are also huge financial rewards because of scarcity. Owning a radio or TV outlet was a license to print money. Newspapers and broadcasters draw a paying crowd. Advertisers pay handsomely to communicate with that crowd.

Technology lowers the barriers to entry by making everyone with a computer (or now, a smart phone) a publisher and broadcaster at a relatively modest price. In an information technology there are broadcasters and publishers aplenty so the scarcity model no longer applies. But most individual producers have a small audience. Where is their motivation to produce?

Benkler looks beyond the conventional economic assumption that we are rational economic beings who are always motivated by financial rewards and dissuaded by financial penalties. He argues for the role of non-financial rewards like peer recognition. He points out intrinsic motivations like pleasure, personal satisfaction, and a desire to make the world a better place.

He cites peer production by Viking ship hobbyists, developers of the GNU/ Linux operating system, Wikipedia. We could add reviewers for Amazon.com and participants on Slash Dot web site who peer review entries.

Benkler heralds the rise of information technology as helping to create a critical and discursively engaged public. By this he means a public vigorously debating issues and confronting opposing views.

I do not dispute Benkler’s core point but I have three critical comments. First, these benefits of peer non-market production are not exclusive to information technology. Volunteers in social clubs, community radio, and churches provide an off-line model. But Benkler is correct in pointing the vast increase in scope from this model on the internet.

Second, while information technologies do make it easier for people to work together on politics and social issues, the depth of their involvement can be superficial. In some cases information technology is an internet version of the phone tree rather than a cyber town hall.

Last October at a Knight Fellowship Program for journalists on covering digital culture which I attended, Adam Green, civic communications director for MoveOn.org Civic Action, the on-line political organizing group, gave examples of their growing power to influence politics by quickly enlisting large number of like-minded people to sign a petition or write to a politician or journalist. These instant massive organizing efforts have effectively changed the political landscape.

Green said people are very busy these days. They don’t have time to closely look at the issues. So when they come from a busy day at work they can act according to MoveOn.org’s recommendations. This is convenient, easy and effective. It is not an example of a discursively engaged public.

The third critique of the group production model comes from Nicholas Carr, former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, author of Does IT Matter? and The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. Carr believes new information technologies put the means of production into the hands of the masses but very few harvest the economic value of that production.

He cites the examples of Facebook and MySpace. They have given away the tools of production while maintaining ownership, and the advertising profit, from the resulting products. Carr calls it a sharecropping system where the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money. The plantation owners are motivated by money. This is more like the industrial information model where TV viewers attention is a value is harvested by the broadcasters in ad sales than a more equitable social model.

These points are relatively minor quibbles about an expansive and persuasive manifesto. The current powerful examples like Wikipedia suffice to prove the potential. But the era of industrial information is far from dead. “Internet revolution” implies a radical break with the past. What we are seeing is an internet evolution.