Benkler and Innis: Two “Revolutionary” Technology Historians
Because Yochai Benkler emphasizes the potentially revolutionary function of the internet to promote and facilitate the enactment of social justice, comparing his approach to that of Harold Innis seems pertinent. The obvious difference between the two writers’ approaches derives from the grand historical sweep of The Bias of Communication to the current insularity of The Wealth of Networks: while Innis describes the revolutionary social and cultural impacts of numerous communication technologies throughout the history of humanity, Benkler focuses on the internet.
As we discussed in class, if we plug the internet into the general timeline of communication technology that began with simpler mediums like stone and papyrus, the new medium should follow the generalization set up by Innis. If every new communication technology in the history of mankind, whether biased by time or space, has “caused” a social change, then the internet should not be an exception. Whether Innis’s argument would still “hold true” for the internet cannot really be established until a future historian looks back on our current situation and can demonstrate both that the space-biased internet created a revolution to overturn a time-biased medium (television) and that some as yet inexistent futuristic time-biased medium will cause a social revolution that makes the internet seem time-biased as well. Benkler seems to think this internet-based revolution is in progress.
Benkler, however, is much more tentative, and many times he declares that his speculative claims about the internet’s capacity to empower social justice through democratic potential, greater individual autonomy, increased peer production, widespread availability, working outside of dominating economic structures, enlarged social networking abilities, etc. may or may not actually cause social change in the future. Benkler is optimistic, if not utopian, while Innis, if forced to make a prediction about the internet’s capacity to effect social change, would probably encourage us to bet all our money on revolution.
So, even though Benkler and Innis utilize quite different research methods, they both assume that social change will occur and that communication technology will play a role in shaping, if not outright determining, the result. Hence, it makes sense that critics have written that Benkler suffers from the TD.
A final note: it’s amusing that Benkler’s sole reference to Innis seems to dismiss Innis as a technological determinist by lumping Innis in with Langdon Winner’s concept of technological objects’ politics (17). Indeed, Benkler appears to be agreeing with Innis and Winner throughout: the internet is the device with which we will change society’s politics. The main difference between Benkler and Innis thus comes down to Benkler’s wavering tentativeness in contrast to Innis’s certainty.