Parallel Worlds

It's good to see the "social production" model used on Benkler's own book: posting it to the web for comments and critique. Imposing himself as the "scholarly lawyer" is also interesting given our discussion of Weinberger last week about the three areas of rhetoric. Here's Benkler posting his in-process book in the hopes of not only getting feedback on it, but, like the band that gives its CDs away, he can now charge a greater amount of in-person shows. Also, I wonder how this model contributes to keeping the book current. As we talk in class following the second-half of Nakamura, it's hard to keep media-related books from sounding dated. Benkler's strategy seems like it gives him the option to post a draft (get his work/name out there), revise it and have continued coverage of his work. Seems pretty savvy.

All that in mind, I'm not entirely sold on his idea of "social production" for the rest of us. He mentions it at one point that, yes, this is for a limited range of people at the higher end of developed nations. Taking this a step further, what happens if the world does adopt this new way of functioning, what happens to everyone who is left out? Leaving that big one hanging, I mostly agree on his biggest point: "the relative economic role of sharing changes with technology (120), yes, but there are a lot of conditions related to who is sharing (gender, social class, economic status), if you're not fighting to stay alive, you have more leeway to be generous.

Last week I posted on Weinberger and Corbu about creating more tagging/density as a solution to disorderly piles of information and overcrowding. Now Benkler says, "As the size of the audience and its geographic and social dispersion increased, public discourse developed an increasingly one-way model" (29). Information had to be generic and wide-reaching in order to be cost-effective to address such a diverse audience. Now, let's reconnect everyone. Get everyone talking together and we'll close theses gaps of generic, filtered information and get at the real deal. My jury's still out on this one. As I posted, upping the density failed for Corbu, but these other guys, the results remain to be seen.

The problem I have is that it sounds like the implementation of his ideas would result in parallel economic worlds. Yes, it's great that people will share and contribute out of the goodness of their hearts, but I'm skeptical. Maybe its the result of growing up in the capitalist environment, but all I can think is when are theses folks gonna get paid? And assuming they don't, what are their day-jobs? The cynic in me thinks that if people participating in a task that is "unrelated to 'making a living'" seems unlikely in on a grand scale.

I read another media-oriented book by another economist, Edward Castronova, who is also overreaching slightly the ability for the digital/virtual/synthetic world to imprint its structure onto real life. Castronova also says that, "all things being equal", the activity that is most pleasurable wins. Therefore, he says (and I'm oversimplifying), that the real world will have to adapt to the strategies of the synthetic worlds in order to keep people from migrating there. Soon jobs will be based on leveling-up (like Super Mario Bros.) not on politics or resumes...right. Also his notion of "equal opportunity", which Benkler also raises seems far fetched. The notion that everyone can participate and the redundancy of it all will result in the cream rising to the top, doesn't square. Here redundancy is supposed to work because it's cheap? And in the future, everyone's doing it for free, so who cares?

This idea of taking economic/social models from synthetic environments and overlaying them onto real life seems unlikely and utopic to me. Yes, it sounds cool and empowering for everyone to have a voice and to contribute, but can a functioning economy, in real space and real time, actually be based on such a model? Obviously, I'm skeptical.