In such mass popularization and democratization of production on the Web, no one, says Kelly, would be a consumer. Such passive categories as consumers and audiences would simply vanish, because what matters on the Web is not audience; “what matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption . . . Prosumers produce and consume at once” (Kelly 2005). Power is delivered to “the people” by the democratization and decentralization afforded by network technology, which in turn allows participation and collaboration. As the means of production are democratized, so is the mode of production and social relations in general.<sup>2</sup>
But the collaborative nature of network production not only empowers individuals, enabling a more democratic participation and a more engaged and satisfying experience in production. Kelly’s insistence that “the sphere of social networking . . . [is] the main event” of the network society is backed by another set of arguments. The end result of these collaborative efforts—the what that is being produced (i.e., the network as a product) also turns out to be superior to anything we have experienced in the past. The network as an end result functions as a depository of knowledge, furnishing humans with a newfound and a quasi-transcendental view of the world: “This view is spookily godlike. You can switch your gaze of a spot in the world from map to satellite to 3-D just by clicking. Recall the past? It’s there. Or listen to the daily complaints and travails of almost anyone who blogs (and doesn’t everyone?) I doubt angels have a better view of humanity” (Kelly 2005).
The Web with a “scope . . . [that] is hard to fathom” (Kelly 2005), expands our ability to know the world and ourselves like never before. But more than merely a passive archive of knowledge, the network becomes an active living brain, a “collective intelligence,” in the terms of Pierre Levy (1997). According to Kelly, “The ways of participation unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking—part human and part machine—found nowhere else on the planet or in history” (2005).
Such intelligence can only come about as a result of the collaborative efforts of individuals, since it is based precisely on the democratic and decentralized process of network production that allows individual users to collaborate and work together as a hive. In network production, the seemingly consumerist action of each individual also alters the nature of the product, making it better. For example, Kelly explains that “Google turns traffic and link patterns generated by 2 billion searches a month into the organizing intelligence for a new economy” (Kelly 2005). Another example is Wikipedia, the online collaborative encyclopedia: “Each time we forge a link between words [by clicking a hyperlink] we teach it an idea . . . Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined as ideas are cross-referenced” (Kelly 2005).
Network Production
111