You know, your book is interesting in that it deals with networks and such. You’re definitely right that the changes in technology, social practices, etc., has really changed the way that a lot of people interact with each other.

You mentioned online multiplayer games and such, but you also forgot to include the advent of personal cell phones. There no longer is a single family line. Everyone has their *own* phone that is their *personal* domain.

Being part of networks is “fun”. We enjoy interacting with people. It’s part of our human psychology. Anyway, just some thoughts.

Clear working definitions of “information”, “knowledge” and “culture” ? Or are these what William James called metaphysical “power-bringing words” [SEE: “What is Pragmatism?” ca 1902
“But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.” ]

The term “affordance” has been used in sociology earlier than in Wellman’s text. For example, Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour, in 1992, have defined the concept in their ” Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies”. Latour himself describes, as the source of the concept, the works of James Gibson, a psychologist who in 1977 used the term in an article title “The Theory of Affordance”. Barry Wellman might have imported the term into what is sometimes called “sociology of the internet” – though it has been previously used as well in HCI studies, which are a related field.

Professor Benkler,

I do not think you were arrogant in titling this book the way you did. I’ve read most of it and I do believe it is going to be seen by future generations as “The Wealth of Nations” of our time.

However, I believe time will prove you wrong on one important point: long term, peer production will be encompassed in the price system.

http://wearetheweb.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/benkler-carr-debate/

-P