This is a short clip from the end of the fantastic discussion between Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, recorded at the Futures of Entertainment Conference back in November.

Their discussion focused on social production, how participants are valued, and how they can work with each other or with commercial entities to create things of worth. At the end I was lucky enough to have Benkler answer my question:

How does participation in these user-powered content environments shape the way we value ourselves-as-the-crowd?

I concur with Benkler's relatively rosy outlook. You can already see evidence of it when you look at something like Obama's "crowd" of supporters.

Basically, Benkler's saying that it used to be that something was created by some kind of unified authoritative source. And then the audience was passively supportive or invested in that thing.

But now, "the increasingly widespread practice of people coming together for effective purposes" is changing how audiences or crowds perceive themselves and what they're capable of. Think about how a generation of people who have grown up taking Wikipedia for granted will think about themselves differently. They recognize the power in many people coming together, each making small contributions, and their collective work adding up to something huge and meaningful.

Benkler posits that the result of this shift is that individuals are beginning to perceive other individuals differently. Other people now are seen as potential collaborators and participants in a conversation, and we see ourselves as more effective agents because of our ability to work with others.

Benkler then optimistically asserts that this societal shift may lead to the adoption of a new class of virtues, The Virtues of Collective Action and Collaboration. Benkler alludes to generosity and friendship being among these virtues, but I wonder what these really would be. What are the virtues of the blogosphere? of Twitter? of being a good Facebook citizen? Certainly each environment has its own virtues, but are there also overarching virtues across all of these environments?

You can see the hour long discussion in its entirety here. The rest of the videos from the conference are all available here.