I kept hearing about this book. My friend Katrin over at NTEN told me about it first, then it kept popping up all over. The book is "The Wealth of Networks", by Yochai Benkler, who is a professor at Yale Law School. It's available at that link in a multitude of forms. I have it in nice, wonderful book form. I like portable that way.

Anyway, I should apologize in advance for overlapping series (or not, I guess.) I'm not finished with the Web 2.0 series, but I really wanted to delve into the meat of this book, and blog about it. I think I'm liking the book so much because it's an amazing combination of some of my favorite things: technology, law and economics. (No, sadly, no theology here, but I could probably find a way to weave it in.)

I'll start out with Chapter 1, which introduces the basic ideas of the book, and the importance of this particular moment. He lays out the beginnings of his arguments - that information and cultural production are central to human freedom and development, and that this new, "networked information economy" is providing a disruptive moment in time, and, with social action, we can use this new kind of economy to further human freedom, even as other forces are trying to create systems that will limit it.

He lays out some interesting concepts, things I'd been aware of, but not really studied enough to articulate. He talks about how the motivations for information and cultural production are very often nonprofit and nonproprietary, and that as the costs of information production goes down, those motivations start taking the fore - they become more important. He talks about the ways that a networked information economy increases autonomy for individuals, and he deftly answers the critiques of the democratization of information that the networked information economy provides. And then he lays out the resistance of actors which he calls part of the "industrial information economy" that are working to limit this broadening effect on autonomy and freedom. He argues that we are going to have to work for this - it's not going to just happen because the technology provides these opportunities.

I'll be blogging chapter by chapter, probably. They are pretty dense, although I'm having a great time with Chapter 2 already - it's nice to see empirical evidence for things I've been thinking for a while.