A Free Irresponsible Press

Four years after its first document release, in 2010, Wikileaks became the center of an international storm surrounding the role of the individual in the networked public sphere. It forces us to ask us how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet. The freedom that the Internet provides to networked individuals and cooperative associations to speak their minds and organize around their causes has been deployed over the past decade to develop new networked models of the fourth estate. These models circumvent the social and organizational frameworks of traditional media, which played a large role in framing the balance between freedom and responsibility of the press.

by Yochai Benkle, A FREE IRRESPONSIBLE PRESS: WIKILEAKS AND THE BATTLE OVER THE SOUL OF THE NETWORKED FOURTH ESTATE (http://benkler.org/Benkler%20Wikileaks%20CRCL%20Working%20Paper%20Feb_8.pdf)