The Regulon

If exponentiality is fatality, as one writer suggests, then information is creating a new kind of ecosystem that violates natural laws of selection and survival. Modern media have no predators, and are not subject to biological or Darwinian-style selections -- the Regulon. Thus media can proliferate eternally, overwhelming coherence and reality. There is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, is one new theory about information.We could use some help from physicists and biologists here.

Can modern media be killed? Does information have any natural predators? Or will it grow exponentially, forever, until it approaches the Omega Point -- the computer-science fatalist theory that continued rapid change eventually leads to something that dramatically transforms the fundamental situation of people in the universe. Is there any way -- natural, electronic or organic -- to stop information from proliferating?

The answer from New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, who fled the States for Paris, in part, so his child could get a respite from the American information explosion, is a firm No. In this age, media defy natural laws of the survival of species. Lots of information languishes, is ignored, or ends up stranded in dead links and ghost sites, but it only seems to replicate.

In his engaging book Paris To The Moon, Gopnik describes a visit to an intellectual salon where an economist lectured on exponentiality.

"Exponentiality is fatality," the economist announced, explaining that the exponential proliferation of biological life -- each codfish has a million offspring; each young codfish has a million of its own -- means that the codfish, or slime mold or antelope, would cover the earth unless something stopped it.

"Therefore," Gopnik quotes the economist as saying, "there must exist in the biological sphere a principle, which I will call the Regulon, which prevents this from happening."

Gopnik wisely points out that Darwin pretty much covered this ground. Predators will eat most of the codfish. Most of the remainder die. Life is hard, and members of many species don't make it.

But I remained fixated on the idea that there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information. We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check. Each is breeding information and media. We can't stem or steer the natural proliferation of movies, TV shows, books, songs, poems, pitches, spins, videogames, junk mail, ads, Washington talk shows and radio hosts.

The global economy remains a chimera. It's really much more about the flow of information than of goods. It's information that's being globalized, at least within the English-speaking world, information that's proliferating at a rate that suggests that media are not subject to Darwin's theories. Information can't be killed or curbed unless you want to live like the Unabomber.

The early hackers opened a Pandora's Box by proclaiming that information wants to be free. Increasingly it is free, but nobody dreamed there would be so much of it, spreading so wildly. Look at media coverage of sensational stories -- like the death of Princess Di, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Monica Lewinsky mess or the recent electoral nightmare. In the absence of a Regulon, information could proliferate to the point that it overwhelms us. Picture a world in which all those codfish live.

With so many Web sites, Web logs, mailing lists, networks, magazines, instant messages, conferences, shows, gasbags, lobbyists, experts, scholars, junk mail and politicians bombarding us that we really have no idea what might or might not be true. The public is beseiged to the point of stalemate, a possible explanation of the dead tie in the presidential election. In the absence of natural selection, information spreads. And spreads.

Media seem to live apart even from accepted business rules. Companies like Disney, Microsoft and G.E. all want to own and make media sites -- Slate, CNN, ABC News, MSN, MSNBC -- even if they aren't profitable and have no chance of ever succeeding, viewing them as synergistic economic necessities. So the sites aren't subject to the economic or social versions of laws that govern biological species like the codfish. It no longer seems to even matter if they have readers or how many. This isn't to say that all media is consumed or successful. There are now a billion Web sites out there. How many have you been on? And dead links are everywhere in cyberspace. Still, they aren't technically dead, just dormant.

This suggests that information is creating its own eco-system, a meme-driven, self-replicating technology that won't quit and can't be killed.

Or can it? Gopnik says you can kill some of it by pulling plugs, but in an increasingly wireless world, that may not be an option for long. Can anything destroy it? Will it self-destruct naturally? Maybe not. As the Net continues to decentralize -- Open Source, freenet, Gnutella, P2P, Napster -- it seems inevitable that media will also continue to grow, exponentially at an even faster rate. Everybody who makes it to the Net or the Web can produce information, pass it along and replicate it, share music, video and text files; create Web pages; open e-mail and other accounts; join mailing lists and Web logs, store material. And that's with only half of Americans having access to computers, and a fraction of the rest of the world's population. The number of people generating their own information will multiply in coming years, while the people already generating information will simply be producing more of it?

Governments, potentially, could seek to censor the Net and reverse the free flow of information. But none has yet emerged that seems up to the task technologically, even if they like the idea ideologically. Certainly the miserable efforts of the U.S. Congress to pass Communications Decency Acts failed spectacularly.

Corporations have a better shot at curbing information, but they have no motive to do so. Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner, along with the music companies have the legal ability and access to technical resources. But they want to make more information and they want to profit from its spread, especially once they figure out how to charge for it, as Bertelsmann is trying to do with Napster. And they are increasingly dependent in information for their own business operations.

As for traditional institutions like religion, academe, law enforcement and politics, they haven't got a prayer at keeping up. The teenagers writing code are light years ahead of them when it comes to creating and circumventing new information technologies. No member of the clergy or school principal can reverse the trend, and most parents have quit trying. They know their kids need computers to survive in the world; they know they can't control them once they turn the machines on. Apart from some pathetic efforts with blocking and filtering software, adults mostly cross their fingers and hope the young are headed somewhere healthy.

Concludes Gopnik: "There is No Regulon in the Semiosphere is a wildly abstract way of saying that there is no 'natural predator' to stop the proliferation" of media. They do and will, he suggests, overwhelm the world, and with it reality.

"It is hard to see how you save the carousel and the musical horse in a world of video games not because the carousel and musical horse are less attractive to children than the Game Boy, but because the carousel and the musical horse are single things in one fixed place and the video games are everywhere, no Regulon to eat them up."

Comments

I beg to differ....

[kenthorvath]

But I remained fixated on the idea that there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information.

Where do you think the MPAA and RIAA come in? Certaintly not an advocate of the proliferation of electronic information...

Egads...

[RareHeintz]

In this age, media defy natural laws of the survival of species.

Hold on... I'm having an epiphany here... Feels like a deep one...

Yes! That's it! That's the reason! Media are not species, and thus are not bound by the laws governing organisms! Wow! Jon Katz has led me to the mountaintop yet again...

OK,
- B
--

Human Condition...

[GoNINzo]

Modern day humans don't have natural selection, why should their media? We have no method to weed out the weak, we routinely save the sick, and the moronic are glorified in our society. Take a look at Forest Gump for instance...

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I'm sure some predator would have taken me down in high school. But isn't Katz kind of missing the point by trying to apply biological anologies to an abstract entitity when it doesn't even apply to the biologicals that created the abstract concept?

--
Gonzo Granzeau

If you don't like information, don't seek it

[el_munkie]

This article repeats one point over and over again: Information will grow unchecked, and eventually overwhelm us.

However, the author's rant seems to be nonsensical. You cannot apply Darwin's theories to non-organic things. Information does not reproduce by itself, it does not compete with us for food, and it doesnt even take up that much space. I can go buy a 60 Gb hard drive, and I can fit an enormous amount of information in the physical space that a hamstar would take up. Guess what else? I can format the sucker if it gets too full. In the parlance of this article, this would be equivalent to dropping an A-bomb on aa rainforest ecosystem.

Data exists at our whim, we can do what we want with it. If you are feeling overloaded by it, turn off your computer.

My Battle with Infinite Information

[Bonker]

The 'regulon' you're looking for here, the limiting factor, is humanity's limits to absorb this information. If there is not a demand for it, the information won't be replicated, and therefore won't exist in any substantial sense.

When I go home at night, I have to perform a careful balancing act, like most technically minded people with real lives I would guess, to do a little surfing, read a little news. Watch a little anime that I've downloaded from Alt.binaries.multimedia.anime. Then I do something that does *not* involve the rest of the world or the internet. I spend time with my wife. I play a game. I read a real, print book. I write or draw. I spend time working on my 3d artwork.

I discard over 99% of the information available to me, and refuse to let it take away the kind of life I want to live. The information that I'm not interested in simply dies with me. It doesn't get passed on to anyone I know or reproduced on my website for general consumption. It has 6 billion other ways to procreate, but will not do so through me.

huh?

[DeadSea]

Why is the media exponential? If you have a slime mold and it has a million little slime molds, each of which have a million little slime molds, that is exponential. A single piece of media may be passed around like a chain letter and become exponential but the number of pundits is not and cannot be exponential.

Its a good thing because if the size of Katz's articles got exponentially big, they would now be in the Terrabyte range....

Re:Information *IS* Darwinian

[Hard_Code]

And guess what? Darwinism isn't always *rational* is it? Darwinism uses a greedy algorithm. The fitness test is *solely* how well the idea reproduces. As any number of internet hoaxes will illustrate to you, the mere ability to reproduce a lot is a piss poor test of value. Some of the dumbest ideas are the most widely held, and some of the smartest die fast because they are just too "unpopular". If information is Darwinian, that should at least be saying something is wrong.

Self regulation

[Wreck]

Jon:

But I remained fixated on the idea that there is no Regulon in the Semiosphere, no natural barrier to the endless flow and reproduction of electronic information. We have no way to keep CNN, weatherman, flamers, spammers, Web site designers, e-do gooders and nit-picking coders, pundits, zealots, smart-asses and grumps in check. Each is breeding information and media. We can't stem or steer the natural proliferation of movies, TV shows, books, songs, poems, pitches, spins, videogames, junk mail, ads, Washington talk shows and radio hosts.

I am serious:

Turn off the computer.

Turn off the TV.

Turn off the radio.

Turn off the cell phone.

There, you're the "Regulon". Isn't free will marvelous?

Oh wait: you had these things on because you liked them! Well, then there isn't a problem, is there?

Re:what the hell is a semiosphere?

[Kierthos]

It's typical Katzism for the crap he makes up.

To 'dumb it down' for you, regulon would be a regulating or restraining agent acting on media (in this example), and the semiosphere would be the medium through which the media travels.

Of course, I could be completely off base here, but considering that Katz is making this shit up as he goes along, anything I say can't be that bad in comparison.

And as a last rant against Katz, how the screaming hell does he get to post whatever he wants to when legitimate articles that actually make sense languish under rejection posts?

Good christ, if you want to talk something killing media and ideas, then it's Katz and other "journalists" like him.

Kierthos

There is a predator

[Golias]

Our own interest level (or apathy) regulates what is read on-line. 90% of self-endulgent nonsense on the web is ignored by almost everybody. The author may as well have printed their thoughts on paper and thrown them into a waste bin, never to be seen. Thus, while there is lots of information available on-line, most of it is not actually consumed... All arts fail to exist without an audience, so there is your natural selection.

The only way content which should be weeded out remains is if the writer has been established as a popular content provider. For example, a unique look at school environments following the Columbine shooting could give a writer enough street cred to collect a check for months and months of useless drivel about the nature of "Open Media". However, if that writer does not produce anything worth reading or discussing long enough, people will eventually drift away.

If a writer pontificates on the web and it gets no no hits, is he really being published?

Proof: Information IS Darwinian & Counterproof

[freeBill]

The proof that Gopnick and Katz are wrong on this one is the fact that anyone who hates Jon can set their preferences so they don't have to see his column.

The proof they are right is the fact that most Katz-haters are too stupid to figure out how to do this.

Mindshare

[XNormal]

Unlimited exponential growth requires unlimited resources. Sooner or later you start running low on certain resources and when that happens competition kicks in - competing for the limited resource. Your competitors may try to grab that resource more better than you (more efficient herbivores) or simply try to kill you and get the resources you have successfully gathered (carnivores).

In the case of media I believe the resource that runs out the most quickly is mindshare. There are only so many names that the public can remember. When you have a bigger audience it increases mindshare because not everyone needs to remember all the names, there can be some specialization and interest groups.

The important point, though, is that the public's mindshare capacity grows at a sublinear rate. This means that an audience twice as large can remember less than twice as many different names. The reason for this is that in order to grab mindshare a name does not need to reach a certain number of minds, it needs to reach a certain density, or percentage of the minds because names tend to fade away quite quickly unless you keep hearing them mentioned by your peers. The name needs to reach a certain percentage of your peer group in order to remain in your mind.


----

Too many fallacies

[gavinhall]

Posted by polar_bear:

There are too many logical fallicies in this bit to count -- while it starts with a reasonable premise (there's too much information to be processed -- and it may be taking up too much time distracting the masses from more important matters) it really fades into babble quickly.

If you're going to discuss information and its transmission -- you might want to discuss it in terms of communication theory, not try to shoehorn the discussion into the boundaries of natural selection. Predators for information? Please.

Concerned parties may wish to read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" which discusses the problems with the electronic media and the unchecked proliferation of electronic entertainment -- and what it is doing to public discourse. While I don't agree with every point that Postman makes, it's certainly a much more valid and lucid discussion than this piece of dribble.

It's counter-productive to assault Katz (or anyone else) for their faulty reasoning or pretentious posturing as an authority on these topics. The fact is they do need to be discussed. Even if the initial spark to the conversation was a bit weak, it's still a conversation worth having...

Re:Too many fallacies

[dsplat]

It's counter-productive to assault Katz (or anyone else) for their faulty reasoning or pretentious posturing as an authority on these topics. The fact is they do need to be discussed. Even if the initial spark to the conversation was a bit weak, it's still a conversation worth having...

In fact, I initially thought about flaming the fact that so many journalists have such a shallow understanding of the topics they report that they grossly misrepresent them. However, I realized that I didn't intend that criticism toward Mr. Katz in this case. He is reporting someone else's ideas for discussion. I have to give him credit to for presenting them rather objectively.

This issue needs to be discussed by people like us. If we aren't familiar with the half thought out ideas that are being foisted onto the general public, we won't be prepared for some of the idiotic legislation that they may spawn to address the imagined crises. Politicians are less informed than journalists. They don't have the luxury of limiting the scope of what they will consider to general subjects about which they know something. They deal with the issues that arise, real or imagined.

Whee!

[Chris Johnson]

I can't help but be _very_ amused at the terminology reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica ("Watch out Starbuck, you've got a Regulon on your tail!")

That said- why did Katz, who is familiar with television, miss this potentially embarrassing detail?

• X-Files: 504,000 hits
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 235,000 hits
• Battlestar Galactica: 35,800 hits

There's your 'regulon', right there.

Not only that, I can _demonstrate_ the Regulon. Watch closely:

• Woohoo, go download my nifty music at www.besonic.com/chrisj right away! Click here!!!

_Effusive_ apologies for carrying on like that, but notice what just happened? A whole bunch of people totally ignored the hype. Just as a whole bunch of people now ignore politics and won't vote, etc. When you are drowning in information you really lose interest in selecting among it, and you begin to reject _all_ of it simply because too much of it is unsuitable or inappropriate...

I post to a musician web board, and a common topic has been, "Ack, get a load of these clowns email spamming all of us to get downloaded!" This gets great contempt. Well, just recently everyone got spammed by a _new_ twist- a person sending 'a fan has sent you an email!' mail, who expressed great appreciation, said they downloaded all your songs and if you check it turns out they _did_, and asks only, "Will you put me on your band's mailing list so I can be informed when new material comes out?"

The consensus was: it was a very determined attempt to harvest addresses- which would then be spammed to hell. Many people got this treatment, and some of them had bought in to similar approaches and ended up getting spammed like mad from bands they had not even heard of.

So at this point in this musician community, the 'fan has sent you an email' mechanism (operated from a web page) has become utterly worthless because there is no perceptible difference between a genuine fan and attempts to harvest emails. You can't even go by 'does the mail display someone else's URL or is it just a letter' because it can be seemingly a totally sincere letter and _still_ be a baited hook!

That situation would seemingly be immune to 'regulons' and yet in practice the mechanism can end up ignored due to abuses.

I've said before that we're looking at an economy of _attention_, and this is precisely the regulating factor. Much advertising, not to mention web advertising, is useless- some actually un-sells products by being too annoying (this can be measured...) and the more advertising screams for attention the less it's noticed.

Know who Victor Kiam is? You've probably seen his face. People recognise him on the street because he is the guy who 'liked the shaver so much, he bought the company'. He sells electric razors in those advertisements.

Quick- what is the brand name of razor he's selling? People recognise this guy's face on the street and remember the 'I bought the company' tagline. When he then asks them what is the name of the company, more than half of the people don't know.

Quick, what sport is Michael Jordan known for? You'll find many people recognise the name but haven't a clue what the guy does.

Regulon, meet Katz. Katz, meet Regulon. ...but you already know each other, don't you? Because Regulon has been causing people to tune _you_ out, Katz, for years. Just as it does to _everybody_.