Industrial information economy

Industrial information economy is a term coined by Harvard University Professor Yochai Benkler. Benkler discusses this term in-depth in his 2006 book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Industrial information economy is the first form of information economy and has existed since the late-nineteenth century and into the twentieth-century (Benkler 2006, p. 3). Recently, industrial information economy evolved into a new form known as networked information economy with the advent of the Internet (Benkler 2003, pp. 1250–1251).

It represents one in which consumers are passive, as opposed to the networked information economy in which consumers are active often to the point of equally being producers (either in terms of creativity or by allowing usage of their idle processing, storage or bandwidth). In addition, industrial information economy promoted the dominance of the mega-corporation, and created passive workers who had no control over what they produced or consumed.

Benkler contends that within the industrial information economy "most opportunities to make things that were valuable and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital requirements of making them" (Benkler 2006, p. 6) and thus in comparison to the networked information economy undemocratic. Based on information technology, according to Paliwala, the industrial information economy was centred on information and cultural production, and the manipulation of symbols whereas the networked information economy is based on communications.

Benkler points out (Benkler 2006, p. 2) that the incumbents of the industrial information economy are threatened by the networked information economy. In response to this threat he references examples of the incumbents fighting back; including the broadcast flag and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Other well known examples could have equally have been added such as telephone operator blocking of Skype (Blue Coat n.d.), the HDCP standard as well as other forms of digital rights management such as those found in Microsoft Vista (Gutmann n.d.).

...
Wikipedia