Benkler, Y., 2006, The Wealth of Networks, Yale University Press, New Haven and London
- Author : Benkler, Y.
- Year : 2006
- Title English : The Wealth of Networks
- Publisher : Yale University Press
- Publisher's Location : New Haven and London
- ISBN : 978-0-300-12577-1
- Pages : 515
- Edition : Pbk
- Comments : p. 1 ‘It seems passé today to speak of “the Internet revolution”. …But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have co-evolved for almost two centuries. A series of changes in technologies, economic organisation, and social practices of production in this environment has created new opportunities for how we make and exchange information, knowledge and culture.’ p. 27 ‘During periods of perturbation, more of the ways in which society organises itself are up for grabs; more can be renegotiated, as the various other components of human stability adjust to the changes. To borrow Stephen Jay Gould’s term for evolutionary theory, human societies exist in a series of punctuated equilibria. The periods of disequilibrium are not necessarily long.’ ‘We are in the midst of a technological, economic and organisational transformation that allows us to re-negotiate the terms of freedom, justice and productivity in the information society.’ p. 32 ‘The most important aspect of the nerworked information economy is the possibility it opens of reversing the control focus of the industrial information economy. In particular it holds out the possibility of reversing two trends in cultural prodcution central to the project of control: concentration and commercialisation. … The high capital costs that were a prerequisite to gathering, working and communicating information, knowledge and culture have now been widely distributed in the society. The entry barrier they posed no longer offers a condensation point for the large organisations that once dominated the information environment. Instead emerging models of information and cultural production, radically decentralised and based on emergent models of cooperation and sharing, but also of simple coordinate coexistence, are beginning to take on an ever-larger role in how we produce meaning – information, knowledge and culture – in the networked information economy.’