The Wealth of Networks
Yale University Press has just released Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. You can buy it at Powells, and Amazon, but it’s also available from Benkler under Creative Commons with an associated wiki. There’ll be more about this book on CT soon – for the moment, suffice to say that I think that this is a really important book, not only for people interested in the politics of technology, but for people interested in left or liberal politics more generally. It fizzes with ideas.
posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
[...] [via Crooked Timber.] [...]
Just gave this a cursory couple-hour read and yes—it’s fascinating & well-balanced. Hope we get to have a CT seminar on this soon (and that when we do, we have a centralized post/joint comments)!
Jack Balkin had us read most of this book for a class he was teaching last semester. Without looking back through my notes in order to make a substantive comment, I think I can safely say it was excellent.
[...] Henry over at Crooked Timber posted over the weekend about Yochai Benkler’s new book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which has just been released by Yale University Press. Benkler has also made the book available in PDF format, and has created a wiki for the text, allowing for a different kind of interaction between readers and this text: The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book’s notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available. [...]