While I was working with the Windows Media team, the NAB conference was one of the highlights of the year. We were pushing new technology into the work flows at the very heart of 20th century big media, and it was very exciting to be part of the end of TV as we know it. (If you want a sense of how Windows Media fits into the world of big broadcast, check out their pages for AV pros.) Walking the floor of the LVCC for the first time in 2001, I was blown away by the spectacle of all the capital involved when you want to reach millions through traditional media (think of a $75K hardware encoder versus a free, downloadable, software encoder). It’s the scene I call to mind when Benkler writes about the threat of the incumbency and the need to protect new social patterns from them.
The folks who will upset the incumbency aren’t even playing the same game, “Nonmarket behavior is becoming central to producing our information and cultural environment. Sources of knowledge and cultural edification, through which we come to know and comprehend the world, to form our opinions about it, and to express ourselves in communication with others about what we see and believe have shifted from heavy reliance on commercial, concentrated media, to being produced on a much more widely distributed model, by many actors who are not driven by the imperatives of advertising or the sale of entertainment goods.” (56)
Benkler insists on the deep connection between markets and democracy, and a significant part of his project is to outline the economic sustainability of the new networked information economy he’s describing. He’s not into “an exercise in pastoral utopianism” but directly concerned with practical possibilities and the real need to take social and political action. “We still stand at a point where information production could be regulated so that, for most users, it will be forced back into the industrial model, squelching the emerging model of individual, radically decentralized, and nonmarket production and its attendant improvements in freedom and justice” (26). Benkler is not writing about the fringe when he describes our current state of change. Information and cultural production are at the core of our economy; establishing nonmarket, nonproprietary production systems at the core will result in radical changes to the democratic apparatus. (Benkler makes a great counterpoint for Chun, BTW.)
Comments