Benkler

After reading Benkler I noticed that he is an advocate of the social networked sphere and feels that it brings about many positive developments for democratic communication. I think that it is a good means of communicating collectively with one another and it is like he said becoming more readily available. It is becoming a very important part of our society to be able to communicate with one another and not even necessarily on just a local level. It is very good to be able to spread knowledge, opinions, and ideas throughout the world.
One example of a social network that I think is really good would be Youtube, because I feel that it coincides with Benkler's social networking aspects. It can be used for a variety of things sucha as sharing videos on a multitude of different topics. Although there is a lot of useless videos on it it also has its upside, in recent years musicians, artists and other people are taking advantage of it and using it to advance in their career. Also the fact that everyone in the world will have access to your video posts and be allowed to post comments and feedback makes it a very sociable and useful site. You can now even create channels and pages where people can subscribe to you and you can keep in contact or even just chat.
From my experience with Youtube, I can say it was very useful in social networking in regards to my family. A couple of years ago I went to Mexico and some of my family was not able to attend. I also have family in Texas, Florida, and California. And they wanted to know how our vacation was. So what I did was make a video and added pics to it and posted it on Youtube for them to see. I thought it was very helpful to be able to share the experience with my family, but what surprised me the most was that a lot of other people that are from San Luis Potosi, Mexico (where I'm from) living in the U.S. also viewed my video. I had a bunch of posts from my family and even from people I didn't even know.