Crowley Carnival, The Wealth of Networks

These comp/rhet reading carnival things always seem to crop up at the worst time for me. For example, at least Jenny, Jeff, and Debbie Hawhee are into reading Sharon Crowley’s latest book, Towards a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. And of course, they pick now, the end of the term, tons of grading and other last minute projects, to attend to. Sheesh. Well, judging from what they are saying here, it looks like it will be something worth looking at later.

Speaking of which: the other day I stumbled across the wiki for Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. This might be something I look through before the Crowley book, to tell the truth. For starters, the whole thing is available as a PDF on the wiki page for the book. But beyond the whole “ease of access” issue, Benkler’s book (as Will Richardson has blogged) was characterized by Lawrence Lessig as “by far the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.â€� Pretty darn high praise indeed….