Yochai
Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2006) was – and remains – a major tract about the ongoing societal transformations related to the proliferation of communication via electronic networks, particularly the Internet. Much public debate has already taken place about the ideas in this book; many of the reviews, videos and audio recordings have been compiled on a specially constructed wiki.
Lawarence Lessig was ecstatic about the book in a post on his blog in April 2006:
Yochai Benkler's book, The Weath of Networks, is out. 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 book has a wiki; it can be downloaded as a pdf for free under a Creative Commons license; or it can be bought at places like Amazon.
Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues -- on either side of these debates -- unless you have read this book.
Here are a couple of additional resources mentioned by Techbowl:
A quick Yochai Benkler blog search, provided me with the following conclusions: 1. Yochai Benkler does not have a blog. 2. The search led to this nice blog summary of a talk Mr. Benkler gave not too long ago, you can find it at "Joho theBlog" and a more recent account here.
From a publishing perspective, the book is interesting in that it is both available as a conventional bound volume from booksellers as well as an online document that can be downloaded free of charge. To facilitate different formats and preferences, it is possible to download the entire book or individual chapters, and these are available in pdf and print-friendly versions. I haven't seen any other publication available in such diversity with such accessibility.
For the purposes of this seminar, we will be reading a couple of the chapters in The Wealth of Networks later in the course, but let me already note them here:
Chapter 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media (433 KB) Paper-friendly version (232 KB)
Chapter 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere (716 KB) Paper-friendly version (503 KB)
Regarding Benkler, public sphere, and Habermas, Howard Rheingold, in his blog Smart Mobs, posted a nice reflective piece on a talk Habermas gave a few months ago in the Bay Area. Essentially Rheingold asked Habermas whether the public sphere may have been given a 'new lease on life' thanks to the 'wealth of networks' formulated by Benkler.
A video **not** mentioned on the above Wealth of Networks wiki is available at the MIT Press site and includes a discussion between Benkler and Henry Jenkins, entitled News, Information and the Wealth of Networks.
1 comment:
Thank you for this. I have read and enjoyed chapters 6 and 7 and I find them interesting and very clearly written. When I was reading chapter 6 and going through Benkler's understanding of public sphere I remembered C. W. Mills's concept of "the public" with two differences or upgrades - universal intake and filtering. His understqanding of public sphere is very compatible with my understanding of e-journalism (enhanced journalism) - fusion of "public journalism" and contemporary understandings of online journalism ...
In chapter 7 I was disappointed with the fact that he did not include the really big "mainstream" or "commercial" online information players (cnn.com, nytimes etc., cf. PEW research) in his debate on networked public sphere ...
What do you think?
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