Challenges Posed by Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age

Yochai Benkler

Reported by: Nina O’Brien, Allie Noyes & Lauren Frank

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, the economic, social, and political roles of commons-based practices in the networked environment, and the emergence of large scale cooperation as a major dimension of social production.

In the second session of the Annenberg Networks Network (ANN) conference, Benkler presented his ideas about networks, power and freedom in the digital age.  He began by reviewing different dimensions of power–including political, industrial organization, cultural, institutional design, technical platform design, and social practices and norms.  He posed a series of questions about how power flows differently in the digital age and then framed his focus as exploring how we use the computer-mediated nature of the networked society to make machine observations more complete and refined as a method of studying social relations.

Benkler addressed the changes in legal and organizational power by providing an example of how the network can be used to emphasize counter power (e.g., free music downloads with request for donations).  He suggested that emerging ecosystems based on things like voluntary sites and fan culture may be able to challenge traditional capitalist power structures and destabilize existing categories of power (e.g., consumers vs. producers).  However, as he builds a possible case for the idea that the internet “democratizes,” he also interjects the major waves of criticism of this idea.

The argument for the idea that the internet democratizes is based on the fact that suddenly anyone and everyone has the power to be a “pamphleteer” and to disseminate information widely.  The first generation critique of this argument is based on the issue of fragmentation.  Although anyone can disseminate information, people are consuming information based on personal beliefs and preferences and are no longer confronted with ideas that challenge their point of view.  The second generation critique of the “internet democratizes” idea is related to the power law distribution of links.  It may be possible for anyone to present information to the world vis a vis the internet; however, the vast majority of the information on the internet is never viewed by a substantial audience.

Finally, Benkler reviewed a number of challenges to studying networks, power and freedom in the digital age.  What is the entity of interest?  Is it the blog or perhaps the individual author?  What is the network of interest?  Do blogs and newspapers get combined into one network?  How is it possible to account for diverse structures within a network (e.g., political networks that differ substantially between the left and right)?  What are the limits of network analysis on these questions?  Is is possible to integrate many different kinds of research into network approaches–like qualitative research, text analysis, offline networked power, money and other power systems, and behavioral/brain sciences?

Discussion

  • Capra: Multi-dimensional webs are reminiscent of chaos theory which has succeeded in solving equations with variables and producing compact representations of a system.  Have network theorists thought of defining the space of variables?

Benkler: All of this is at an early stage.  Other people can improve upon it with different skill sets.

  • Barzilai-Nahon: With bloggers, do we have replication?  Maybe they are not a mob, but instead merging elites in real time.  What do you think?

Benkler: I have had my share of being overly optimistic about the democratizing effect of the web.  By definition, someone who has time online may be elite.  Does it change from a few hundred or thousand people being able to influence the political system to 2-3 million being able to directly affect and a total of 30 million able to indirectly affect? Maybe now being part of the elite makes you part of 20-30% of population, rather than a fraction of a percent.

Barzilai-Nahon: The real question may not be about the numbers but about what it means.  Maybe the number is not important.

  • Latour:  There is a vast amount of information available.  Are we talking about scaling up or compounding so many profiles?  Can we go back and forth?  It seems the advantage should be that we can simultaneously look at the whole and zoom in on specific parts.

Benkler:  We may just be using the term “scaling up” differently.  We are scaling up our ability to make subtle judgments that humans can make without the benefit of a machine.  When we zoom back in, we still get a high-resolution image.

Additional Readings:

Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale UP.