Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Drawing a parallel from the transnational trade of merchants which as an 'invisible hand' built the wealth of nations one could try to identify 'natural inclinations' in the socio-technical ecosystem of digital culture and the interactions in user networks. Terms such as collective intelligence, folksonomies, the blogosphere describe the massive production of content online, that is difficult to analyze and to explain. Intrinsic motivation often was recognized as the drive behind unpaid and voluntary labor online. Research so far has mostly focused on entities such as individual users or communities. The macro level is often described metaphorical and used as a black box that would not be opened and analyzed closely.
Recent critique as formulated by Jaron Lanier in Digital Maoism or Geert Lovink in Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse raise doubts concerning the enthusiasm about collective production. The interdependencies between the media practice and the technological systems have a profound -not necessarily valuable- impact in shaping our knowledge resource. Meta-technologies as used in digg.com or technorati have an effect on both, search machine results and the perception of the world as represented online. (see D. Marcus, Why Digg Failed)
Massive user interactions, which often do not take place in defined communities, which often do not fit into the definition of computer mediated communication and can not fully be explained in terms of the network, have to be analyzed in its interdependencies with the technological systems. What side-effects are these interactions causing that are not fully considered yet? What methods to examine the inter-relations and which terms to describe the interactions and the inherent sociability?
Date March 2007 Category News
The Wealth of Networks is a very interesting and enjoyable book on the collective production online. Yochai Benkler describes at hand of many examples how collectives of users generate valuable knowledge and a cultural resource. He refers to examples of successful bypassing repressive attempts of the copyright industry or politics. Benkler recognizes the media practice of communities as new ways of organizing citizenship and cultural production. The networks of collectives cause conflicts with the conventional system of civil administration and cultural industries. Benkler's argument is supported by case studies which explain the dynamics of collective production in networks. However Benkler sometimes seems to be quite optimistic about the capability of networks and the usage of technology.
Important is his claim for socio-political responsibility in dealing with the new cultural resources, a global archive and infrastructure, that are shaped by millions of users and that forms a crucial aspect of tomorrow's information society. The weblog Crooked Timber organized a seminar to discuss the book and published their various accounts to Benkler's hypotheses as well as his reply.