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11 Nov 08

1 - The Wealth of Networks

www.jus.uio.no/...1.html - Preview

yochai-benkler to-read network-economy

02 Nov 08

The Wealth of Networks html version

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yochai-benkler social-web

20 Nov 07

review of The wealth of networks - by Yochai Benkler

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article686580.ece - Preview

network-economy review yochai-benkler

THE WEALTH OF NETWORKS. How Social production reforms markets and freedom.
Yochari Benkler. 528pp. Yale University Press.
Benkler proposes that similar networks of volunteers will threaten more than Microsoft: working in a similar fashion, but outside software, they are capable of transforming the entire "information and cultural production sector". In the process, they will increase political autonomy, enrich the public sphere, and replace mass culture with a more spontaneous folk culture. The vision is expansive. Yet Benkler gives less emphasis to these grand ends than he does to the means -legal, political and commercial - that might be used to thwart them.
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- There is a major difference between cultural resources like these and Open Source software. Standard use of Open Source software is usually a testament to skill.
- We can tell a certain amount about the merits of Wikipedia, but relatively little about the relative merits of the subjects at issue, when we see it allocates some 11,000 words to Seinfeld and
  5,000 to Shakespeare, or 4,800 to Barbie (the only entry Benkler discusses) and
  1,800 to Bellow.
- Of course, Benkler's book is not about Project Gutenberg or Wikipedia, it is about the "transformation of the information and cultural production sector".
  Few are unaware that this sector is undergoing transformation, and Benkler's identification of major forces at work is important and enlightening.
  
  His underlying vision, however, builds on the possibility of extending "peer production" beyond software to social and cultural projects. Doubts about the equivalence he assumes suggest that, for all the thought that has gone into this book, there is more work to do here, particularly on that question of quality Gates raised thirty years ago.