Joel Turnipseed recently interviewed Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the renowned Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Benkler is author of The Wealth of Networks, a book that looks at the far reaching social, economic, and cultural effects of the Internet on information production, collaboration, and sharing. Here are three quotes that stood out for me:

“My basic claim is that people are diversely motivated, and that large-scale collaboration platforms, with permeable boundaries, freedom and capacity of action, on materials modularized for diversely-sized contributions, allow for the pooling of a diverse range of human talent, insight, experience, and wisdom—much more so than was feasible in more slow-moving organizations…”

“I think realistically we can see a large improvement in the number of people who can effectively participate in the production of information, knowledge, and culture. I think more people are creating media; more people have access to a community or site where they can speak their minds. More does not mean everyone. Disparities in access and skill continue. But there are many more, and more diversely motivated and organized voices and creative talents participating than was feasible ten years ago, much less 30 years ago.”

“I think for academic books in particular, where people may want to assign short portions, or to have students respond to materials, the flexible, permissive book format offers a good complimentary platform. Similarly, in terms of the economics of academic publication, I think the press found that they did much better than usual with this book, partly, at least, because many more people got partial exposure to it online, and then bought it. But I don’t think that this is the long-term strategy for academic presses. Because ultimately the display technology will catch up. What is the right path for academic presses is to use this transition period to learn how to make online books and book sites into powerful learning platforms, and to use those capabilities to reorient the universities from the trend to treating the presses as self-sustained centers, back to a time when the presses were part of what universities needed to subsidize from their main teaching role—as part of their effort to disseminate the knowledge they produce.”

It’s an excellent interview. Benkler has thought well beyond the obvious effects in a technology sense, and looks at the deeper effect of an open network that affords greater participation – it’s a place to practice freedom of speech a constantly innovative, emergent forum. And it requires participation, in both a political and market sense, to keep on the forward edge.