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Review: Yochai Benkler
You can download the whole book here, though you have to be really hard-core to read the entire thing electronically, since it’s nearly 500 pages. (I am really hard-core, in that specialized sense.)
Benkler is a genius – one of the five smartest people I’ve ever met – and a very high-level conceptual thinker. This book is a masterpiece of synthesis of his work and that of others about fundamental changes in production of information-related goods made possible by changes in technology. Peer production can match and even overmatch the market and the firm under appropriate circumstances; fan creations are a good example of this. As Benkler says, “The supplementation of the profit motive and the business organization by other motivations and organizational forms – ranging from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects – provides not only a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources that are qualitatively different from others.” Benkler’s use of the “supplement” resonates intriguingly with that of Marvin Carlson and people like Francesca Coppa who’ve been applying performance theory to fandom: Each version of a story is a link in a chain of meaning. On the web, that link might be actual html.
If you’ve been reading in the general area of current intellectual property, this book is not revelatory, but it connects and explores lots of trends and their implications for information production, democracy, and culture. Benkler doesn’t think the outcome is predetermined: Technology offers new possibilities, but law and the interventions of large-scale businesses that stand to lose ground could frustrate those possibilities, for example by ending net neutrality, preventing people from copying as part of remix culture, and so on. (Eric Goldman might be distressed that Benkler doesn’t identify anti-spam laws as one of the laws designed to limit freedom on the net, but Benkler ends with a caution about justifications for increasing centralized control based on concerns for “security” in a post-9/11 world. Though it was written many months ago, it seemed quite timely.)
Stylistically, it’s pretty abstract, with occasional examples. Benkler is a careful thinker, not lost in jargon, and capable of a flourish once in a while, as when he’s in the midst of refuting the idea that electronic communication creates worse ties between people than previous modes – he quotes a critic who says, “E-mail is a way to stay in touch, but you can’t share coffee or beer with somebody on e-mail, or give them a hug,” and adds “(as opposed, one supposes, to the common practice of phone hugs).”
Benkler is a genius – one of the five smartest people I’ve ever met – and a very high-level conceptual thinker. This book is a masterpiece of synthesis of his work and that of others about fundamental changes in production of information-related goods made possible by changes in technology. Peer production can match and even overmatch the market and the firm under appropriate circumstances; fan creations are a good example of this. As Benkler says, “The supplementation of the profit motive and the business organization by other motivations and organizational forms – ranging from individual play to large-scale peer-production projects – provides not only a discontinuously dramatic increase in the number of available information sources but, more significantly, an increase in available information sources that are qualitatively different from others.” Benkler’s use of the “supplement” resonates intriguingly with that of Marvin Carlson and people like Francesca Coppa who’ve been applying performance theory to fandom: Each version of a story is a link in a chain of meaning. On the web, that link might be actual html.
If you’ve been reading in the general area of current intellectual property, this book is not revelatory, but it connects and explores lots of trends and their implications for information production, democracy, and culture. Benkler doesn’t think the outcome is predetermined: Technology offers new possibilities, but law and the interventions of large-scale businesses that stand to lose ground could frustrate those possibilities, for example by ending net neutrality, preventing people from copying as part of remix culture, and so on. (Eric Goldman might be distressed that Benkler doesn’t identify anti-spam laws as one of the laws designed to limit freedom on the net, but Benkler ends with a caution about justifications for increasing centralized control based on concerns for “security” in a post-9/11 world. Though it was written many months ago, it seemed quite timely.)
Stylistically, it’s pretty abstract, with occasional examples. Benkler is a careful thinker, not lost in jargon, and capable of a flourish once in a while, as when he’s in the midst of refuting the idea that electronic communication creates worse ties between people than previous modes – he quotes a critic who says, “E-mail is a way to stay in touch, but you can’t share coffee or beer with somebody on e-mail, or give them a hug,” and adds “(as opposed, one supposes, to the common practice of phone hugs).”
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