Howard and Benkler
Please excuse the casualness of this post (eg. absence of direct quotes and citations), but I need to conserve my more formal writing energy…
The hypermedia campaigners Howard quotes in ethnographic quips throughout his book voice a shared belief that their work helps foster more deliberative American democracy. From that shared assertion, their political, social, and moral values diverge. But its also a job, and while they’d all like to work only on campaigns that to support political objects (to use Howard’s term) with which they are ideologically aligned and which never step outside the boundaries of their own morality in any way, the fact of the matter is that the money doesn’t always land in the hands of their complete ideological allies. Howard and his interviewees give the impression that no one really thinks its completely ok to use people’s credit card histories and web transaction logs to pigeon hole them, but such methods are the means to an end of more representative politics, an aspiration that spans the ideological spectrum and for which some believe we should be willing to sacrifice our privacy.
What sort of model of production would describe the information produced in the hypermedia campaign? To be sure, private companies fill their data banks with specific personal information (“existing information”, in Benkler’s input model) about voters which they pay other firms for, and that employees then aggregate and analyze in the customized reports that are their products. This content is gathered by firms, but it is generated by users. When voters fill out surveys about their political beliefs in order for a computer program to perform a unique query to match them with allied candidates, how could we categorize the model of information production (and I define information very broadly as knowledge codified in some way, through writing, speech, etc.)? If an organization running an operation such as the one above is not in the business of turning a profit, what then? It’s reliant on a market of some sort (for political participation, perhaps?), but can user-drive information production of this sort be understood to fit any production model we’re familiar with? Some of the hypermedia campaign tools facilitate a sort of peer production through providing a forum for political debate, engagement, and participation; what sort of information product is made from this process, and what sort of wealth is created?
So which of the many different kinds of ‘information’ produced through networked ICTs do and do not qualify as being peer-produced? If the definition relies on decentralized production and modularized participation, then personal information gathered in violation of privacy might fit. But if they key elements of individuals’ decision to participate and how are removed from the picture, we have strayed from Benkler’s conception of the liberating new form of information production. Benkler argues that our information environment has always been comprised of a range of information produced through market- and non-market-based processes. The hypermedia campaigns described by Howard illustrate the complexity of different forms of information production, and demonstrates that while peer production is a useful model for understanding some of it, many methods that do not readily fit any one model of production are being employed through the use of networked ICTs.