You guys are amazing.

-T

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GJij_TK6pRw

I’d like to underscore that one of the very serious differences between these softwares is that iMovie comes free with any Apple computer. Final Cut is $300-1300, depending on the package that you buy and if you can finagle an academic discount. Academic discounts bring the price down a lot!

While the price for Final Cut is really worthwhile if you want to become a filmmaker, it may not make sense for most users. You can buy an entire (fantastically functional) iMac computer for $1199 (www.apple.com), a little less than the Final Cut Pro Suite.

We must look carefully at the opportunities and challenges of the networked information economy and the impact of globalization on research, specifically community-based participatory research.

What are the issues facing us?

Those middlemen can’t be discounted yet.

Are they uniting or dividing us? Possibly both.

Thanks so much for your thoughtful comment! Profound observation. Maybe the only thing new about Prof Benkler’s networks is that they are visible to the outside. Networks, the kind that have bonded people for centuries over kitchen tables, were so much harder to see. A blip of energy across a broadband connection is sort of countable, quantifiable, categorizeable. Lots of 1s and 0s. So, digital social theorists have an easier task ahead of them. Nothing as messy as what really happens between people, face-to-face people, in countless and tangled and contradictory relationships.

But, I think that there is something different about these networks. And, I agree, it is not the decentralization. I think what is really different is the geographic spread of networks. How does an ethnic enclave change when everyone can still talk to home, everyday, in their language? How will diasporas change when you can share your music, your ideas, or your images with enclaves across the globe? Maybe places like the Midwest will become less lonely to our brothers and sisters who are satellited there, sending money home.

Professor Benkler of course does a Harvard-size job of tidying up a wobbly world. Lots of change. Some good, some not — but a lot not really new. Maybe renewed, maybe even recycled in times when memories are short. Attention deficited.

Here’s what I mean: 25 years ago, America’s west coast was struggling with what was then a “wave,” a veritable “invasion” of Southeast Asians. Mainstream institutions were stressed. You’ve got to watch besieged folks, like startled dogs, they bite. Bite bad. An erosion, I imagine Prof. Benkler saying, of centralized authority’s, uh, well: authority.

These times are much the same. Mother Mexico’s energetic children are overwhelming us. The Battle for The Border. The War for Immigration Reform. Those needing a better sense of control are anxious about their ability to regulate the rub.

But here’s another thing that happened back then in our ethnic enclaves — the same thing’s true in our new immigrant barrios: families WILL take care of business, with or without mainstream institutional management.

Of course there’s a brawl between ethnic minorities and our dominent culture-carriers, that’s what’s reported in morning news. But there’s much-much more business-as-usual happening “inside” local or indigenous systems. Folks come here, after all, with a thousand-thousand years of social and spiritual capital. Even if financial and political capital accounts are a bit low when families are new.

And so we take care of community business, as Prof. Benkler says, without those pesky middlemen: cops monopolizing the power to police neighborhoods, courts deciding what’s just, big employers determining who to hire, banks evaluating who’s a good risk, and so on and on.

We talk to each other. Directly. A lot of that talk, and the consequent trade in ideas and products and services — goes to affirming and reaffirming community. We talk to ourselves rather than to monolithic Hollywood or Madison Ave or Washington DC monopoly on legitimacy, because as a practical matter it takes a lot less time, effort, love.

It seems what IS new in this “decentralization,” is the emerging (and un-cozy) concept of “community,” indeed: what’s becoming of individual and collective identity when community is digitally (fleetingly) bonded rather than through the older kitchen table conversation. With all those smells. In all that complexity. Uncertainty. Joy.

Looking forward to more posts.