In Chapt. 1, Benkler says:
Two fundamental facts have changed in the economic ecology in which the industrial information enterprises have arisen. First, the basic output that has become dominant in the most advanced economies is human meaning and communication. Second, the basic physical capital necessary to express and communicate human meaning is the connected personal computer. The core functionalities of processing, storage, and communications are widely owned throughout the population of users. Together, these changes destabilize the industrial stage of the information economy.
So two large cultural forces drive the Net Age: the creation and distribution of meaning has become the core product and service of modern societies, and the Net-connected computer puts the means of production in the hands of most anyone, certainly anyone in a modern society. Thus, everyone now has the ability to produce and distribute the dominant, value-adding product of a modern society: information in all its varieties and colors.
I assume that Benkler does not think that the computer makes us all good, or even competent, communicators, but it does give us all access to the microphone. We can all now step up and speak. Not all of us will speak so well, but enough of us, who had once been silent, will speak well. More voices will be heard. And more information and meaning will be created. The one thing that I do know about meaning is that it feeds on meaning. The more meaning there is, then the more that can be created. Meaning is about to explode.
