Benkler

1) I love how Benkler describes our new "internet revolution" and how well the positives are explained. Benkler speaks about how our autonomy is enhanced, because we can do more for ourselves, we have the capacity to do more with people we are less in common with, and we have multiple opportunities do to more in "formal organizations. While reading this I thought to myself how my mothers or grandmothers lives were before we had more social networking or even the internet. I am lucky to have family that is extremely up to date on technology but they speak often of times before our "internet revolution". My grandmother use to be extremely reliant on my grandfather and as times have changed I have been able to watch her become much more independent and selfsuficient because of networking information. I completely agree with Benkler on how the world has been positively benefited from technology and networking.

2) As other's have explained in their blogs we have watched how quickly social networking becomes outdated. I remember when myspace was the biggest thing to have and the easiest way to talk to friends, soon it changed to facebook, and now we are on to twitter. While time has passed each new network has allowed us more opportunities myspace gave us the simple idea of internet social networking, facebook expanded, and now with twitter we can actually follow the lives of celebrities and receive texts and emails straight to our phones when any of our friends have updated their status'. This is a great example of "user-drive innovation" where technology has changed and grown through needs by the individuals.

3) I have been lucky enough to take a Social Movements class through the University of Northern Iowa where I helped set up a social movement on campus. As a class we decided democratically that we wanted to support the legalization of medicinal marijuana, then we created group emails sent to all in the class, and also created a facebook page. We all worked collectively together to bring awareness to our issue and to get representatives to agree with our beliefs. This was a great experience where multiple people of different backgrounds and personalities came together for a social network and social movement to change our society. This shows two examples of the three dimensions of enhanced autonomy. One we worked with people that we didn't have too much in common with nor did we need to organize our relationships in systems or models. We also got to work in a "formal organization" without being inside the "market sphere".