Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks is the best attempt so far at analyzing the developments that made Time Magazine dedicate its person of the year issue to YOU. Together with an email interview with Benkler the book has inspired several articles I have written the past few months (in Norwegian: about Wikipedia, future of the internet, the public sphere.) So in extended entry here – as part 3 of my “longest interview of the year-series”- is the whole unedited Benkler interview. Part 1 was with Daniel Drezner, part 2 with Jimmy Wales.
Undercurrent: From your perspective, what do you expect to be the most important development of the internet in the years from now until 2015?
Benkler: I think the most important developments will be normalization and even greater ubiquity. The long term causes of the transformation represented by the Internet are already in place. Hundreds of millions of people around the planet own the necessary physical capital to create information, knowledge, and culture, alone, and in cooperation in peer production enterprises with others. I do not expect this basic technical-economic fact to change.
Instead, I expect more people to adopt the social practices that underlie free and open source software, Wikipedia, and the many other similar processes. The teenagers who have grown up with ubiquitous, mobile, social media will become the twenty- and thirty-somethings, and even the forty year olds. Businesses that were initially utterly resistant to the newly emerging practices they call “user generated content,” and which I prefer to see as a critical, participatory public sphere, will have adapted. Many will find that there are new ways of doing business around social production, instead of trying to sue their customers and pass legislation that does away with the general purpose computer. Some will simply fail, and be supplanted by new preferences of users to tell their own stories, rather than be talked at.
The deep skepticism at the plausibility and quality of these media will, I expect, be supplanted by an acceptance that we should never fully trust any single source, no matter how “authoritative” in the old-media sense.
Reading, listening, and viewing will come to be adopted as more provisional practices, where users seek multiple alternative sources and make their own judgment, rather than seeking the authoritative source–be it Britannica or Wikipedia, the recording industry or their friends who passed then a song. These practices will then increasingly “go live” as mobile internet connectivity takes the ubiquity of connectivity we see today in Japanese mobile phone youth culture and generalizes it to the population throughout at least the more advanced economies.
Undercurrent: In your book “The Wealth of Networks” you argue that the internet (as an essential part of the networked information economy) has created very favorable conditions for improvements in many areas of society, such as providing people with a better chance to participate in public debate, in the creation and distribution of knowledge and culture. Do you expect that your evaluation will be even more positive in a few years time, or are there counterforces that can halt or reverse what has been achieved?
Benkler: There are, clearly, counterforces pushing back on the future I describe as possible, not inevitable. Throughout most of the 1990s, the two major threats to an open Internet and the social processes it fosters were concerns with national security and pornography on the one hand, and efforts to deal with telecommunications monopolists, on the other hand. The efforts to regulate encryption and porn lead to ham-handed drives to regulate what people could say to each other on the Net. Encryption regulation was largely abandoned, as the global market for software algorithms showed the futility of the effort. Pornography regulation efforts largely failed, but the improvement of search engines and simple user-implemented controls somewhat reduced the threat of unintentional exposure and children.
Since the late 1990s, however, we have seen the most extensive efforts to regulate the networked environment come from the copyright industries and the efforts to shape the architecture of both the software and hardware of the Internet to fit the needs of the incumbent business models of the twentieth century. Regulatory mandates on digital rights management and technology that defeats it, proposals for design mandates on computer hardware for purposes of assuring “trusted” platforms have been the most obvious examples. These have more recently coincided with concerns over security and the fear of cyberterrorism to put significant pressure on the design of the Internet and computers away from a general purpose, open system and towards a more controlled system. If these counterforces prevail, the future of the Internet will look more like a five thousand channel televisions system than the open platform we have come to associate with that term. But as I note in the book, there are strong forces in favor of continued openness. The strong commitment to openness among the infrastructure engineering community and the free and open source software development communities combines here with many businesses in the computer and software industries, in the electronics industries, and in the internet-based industries to pose a formidable challenge to those who would shut down the open internet. The ever-increasing levels of social participation in peer production of information, knowledge, and culture have turned what would have been seen as an arid technical discussion five or seven years ago into a lively political debate, with strong grass roots movements and NGOs standing shoulder to shoulder with multi-billion dollar companies. The stakes are high. The forces arrayed. I cannot for certain say that the open, collaborative model will prevail. But I think it will.
Undercurrent: In the book you write in the context of human development about “the possibility that more of the basic requirements of human welfare and the capabilities necessary to be a productive, self-reliant individual are available outside of the market insulates access to these basic requirements and capabilities from the happenstance of wealth distribution.” As I read you, you believe that we today grossly underestimate the positive potential of the networked information economy for developing countries. If so, how do you think we will evaluate the role of the internet for developing countries from the perspective of 2015?
Benkler: I spend a good bit of time in the book trying to answer that question. At the outset, it is important to be modest about how much of the core problems can indeed be solved through information policy and networked communications.
Clean water, functional governments and a modicum of personal security, basic food security and health cannot all be provided by a better Internet or information policy. This much I think should be admitted. My claim is rather that, given the difficulty of the problems, there is nonetheless a significant amount we can do to alleviate human suffuring even if only in the domain of information policy and networked information production. To begin with, to the extent that networked communications indeed improve democracy and the potential for a participatory public sphere, this by itself will improve human development–both directly, as a component of human flourishing, and indirectly but importantly, through forcing accountability of governments to the development outcomes over which they preside. Most of my effort here has been on mapping out how the nonmarket sector can combine government, traditional NGO, and individuals working alone and collaboratively in peer production processes to provide some of the requirements of human development where markets and traditional government approaches seem to have failed. I use as an initial example free and open source software (FOSS), showing how it can improve the IT capabilities of poorer countries, and how adoption of FOSS can provide a platform for local programmers to participate in a global economy.
More ambitiously, but also more tentatively, I explore how educational materials and scientific publication, databases, and finally collaborative platforms for agronomic and biological innovation, as well as, even more ambitiously drug development and public health organization, can begin to serve the most basic needs of food security, better health, and improved education.
Undercurrent: How do you see the role of Wikipedia and other freely licensed/commons-based projects (such as open access scientific publishing) in the context of global development? (Is Amartya Sen’s claim that democracies with free media do not experience hunger crises a relevant context here?)
Benkler: This is similar to my prior answer. Sen’s claim, to the extent it is true, certainly provides a context in which we can say that improving democracy can further development. Open access publishing can lower the costs of entry into the global information economy, and more basically, can allow people to live a richer life–informed and educated about their own culture and the world in which they live. Innovation and education are core components of development.
Open access publication help to overcome one major barrier to development in these areas. Initiative like the One Laptop Per Child would also be potentially transformative. And yet, we cannot forget that the major reason for lack of education is the opportunity cost of a child’s education for the family. No intervention has been more effective than paying families to send their children to school. While lowering the direct cost of education–through open educational materials–is important, it is not a silver bullet that solves the problems. It can only help within a broader, more complete and integrated solution to the problems of global poverty.
Undercurrent: Will discussions about digital divide be important in 2015, or will they become obsolete as more and more people get broadband connections and PCs?
Benkler: It depends on what you mean by digital divide. If one means the access differences within the wealthier economies, I think it more likely than not that the cost of Internet connectivity will continue to decline while its absolute necessity will increase and expand thorugh the population. This combination will likely overcome the digital divide in terms of raw access.
Whether the skills gap will be higher or lower, whether in a networked economy the differences between those who are best educated and those who just get by will be worsened, and whether that will then be the focus of the digital divide, is difficult to tell. It does, however, appear that schools are being relatively wired in most places, and that children seem to intuit usages where adults do not. This gives some room for optimism that the skills divide too will decline over time. None of this is, however, applicable to the divide between rich countries and poor countries. Here, while I hope to see the improvements I spoke of before, I do not expect the difference in connectivity and use of broadband to be closed quite so quickly.
Undercurrent: You discuss in the book how the quality of knowledge/facts are controlled (relevance/accreditation) in a different way than before (i.e Wikipedia, Slashdot). But doesn’t Wikipedia-style knowledge production still rely on a certain relativization of the quality of knowledge? How will the built-in uncertainty of Wikipedia et al influence how we relate to knowledge?
Benkler: I think the built-in uncertainty of Wikipedia will cure us of the reliance on authority.
In the mass media environment, there was a general culture of “I saw it in print, therefore it must be true.” This culture led to a relative atrophy of critical faculties, and made the public sphere highly manipulable, or simply prone to error. It is not, for example, that well-trained media critics could not point out the dozens of ways in which any given news report or television program were biased or incomplete. They could. But the readers, viewers, and listeners by and large adopted a trusting relationship to their media. We long spoke about the need to teach critical television watching. But that never happened, really. I think as a new generation grows up reading things that never have a clear voice of authority, that have only provisional status as inputs, we will begin to see a more critical, investigative form of reading, as well as listening and viewing. The act of reading will be more like an act of investigation, as one picks up pieces of evidence with variable levels of credibility, triangulates them, and arrives at a conclusion that continues, nonetheless, to be revisable and falsifiable. This is the essence of the scientific method. It is high time that people adopt it more broadly. I embrace this uncertainty, for with it comes critical reading. This trend is then strengthened by the widespread practices of cultural production, what I have characterized as the re-emergence of a new folk culture in the digital environment. People who create know how to be more critical users.
So, we are seeing new forms of accreditation and relevance production emerging on the Net. Wikpedia’s decentralized peer review is one; Slashdot’s moderation system is a much more structured solution. But what will become the most valuable change will be the development of a critical stance as the basic attitude of users. This critical perspective, then, will serve them well as autonomous individuals, as participants in a political society, and as culturally-embedded beings.
Undercurrent: Different internet services and use patterns allow us to insulate ourselves from previous forms of social contact, trivial activities such as going to the bank, travel agency. Social patterns have been eliminated. But you highlight instead the different ways people use the web to engage with others. Overall, will internet use develop to strengthen or weaken (or change in other ways) social ties, the social fabric?
Benkler: I think this is an empirical question, and I think the evidence as of late 2005 when I last surveyed the materials for the last round on this book is fairly persistent. People use the Internet first and foremost to strengthen existing ties with family and friends. The benefits are felt both locally and at a distance. Over and above, people use these networks to create more relationships, with more people, of a more limited nature. But all these come at the expense of television, primarily, and to some extent of running errands. The fear that the Internet will fray social relationships is nothing more than the current iteration of the old, recurring theme that industrialization ruins the pastoral community. The sociological evidence we have is that that is not its primary effect. It strengthens strong ties by making it easier to keep in touch with family and close friends every day.
It also strengthens and broadens the net of weak ties, with looser connections, as the cost of maintaining these declines. While patterns may change, and new evidence may come to light, I try to show in the book that these facts that we observe are consistent with the advantages of the Internet over practically all other media of communication, except face-to-face, as a means of keeping connected to human community.
