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Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has written an excellent article entitled "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality." Simply put, diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality: "A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on." A must read for anyone interested in the statistics, fairness, and power relations of blogging."
this subject is covered in the book Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who focuses on the prevalence of power laws in web traffic and Internet router connectivity. There are also some pretty good explanations on why this makes the Internet more resilient than a randomly linked network but also more vulnerable to malicious acts. This book was covered on slashdot previously. I found it to be a good read.
With over 4 million weblogs currently how can Shirky base his conclusion on less than a valdi statistical sampling?
you would need at least 200,000 blog sin the data set which only has less than 1,000 thus no conclusions can be made of any value..until he gets more data..
But than agai maybe Shirky did not take stats or survey classes in colleg eot know how to do this properly
Don't Tread on OpenSource
A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.
Slashdot.
Slashdot's created an underclass of poster's whose views (rightly or wrongly in your opinion) are supressed by the will of the majority. Over time, they grow disatisfied with the system, and revolt in the only way available to them... flooding the conversation with repetition. I'm sure almost everyone has been the victim of unfair moderation (I know I have), and if you're the victim for too long, you fight back.
Hey give me a break, this is expected and unless you want to read, listen and weblog 24 hours a day, you will find a way to consume what you can. Thanks for analyzing another "phenomenon" that is pretty much expected.
I can't see how that could ever happen here.
<Simpson's Comic Store Guy Voice>
I trump you with my mighty karma, "Worst post, ever!"
</Simpson's Comic Store Guy Voice>
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is also one reason why The Sims Online is completely flopping. Sure, you might be able to get the in-game money to build a great house with lots of accessories, but not everyone can have 15 guests at all times. So, all power is concentrated in certain places, driven by reputation which is picked up early in the process.
Latecomers and people who don't play much end up screwed if they had their hearts set on being the social spot of the game.
...not a troll, think about it: Read the article, substitute the word 'blog' with 'goods and services'... this article is a great argument why capitalism works and communism/socalism doesn't.
Capitalism allows for many freedoms of choice in selecting goods and services, while communism/socialism does not as you must get all your goods and services from only 1 source. (the government). No choice.
Anyways, I like the math and the graphs and such....
Blogging has become the defacto new media for the Net. Many bloggers themselves are becoming more engrossed into news and media than anything else.
BUT, I have seen a trend lately that I would seriously like to discuss. Some very popular blogs (You know who you are), are blogged so much in a given day that it begs to question exactly what the author does during the rest of his work day, the blogs do claim that the author is living a rather eventful life, but my question is... how does the author have time to blog when he's having this super life?
The concern I have here is the max-headroom syndrom. 90% of the popular blogs out there are run by some syndicated company (such as news corps and so on). They may say that it's run by some individual, but that's not simply possible. The writing is done by teams and they try to influence people on the net using their propagenda.
I'm simply sick of this type of blogging. I have been a techinical blogger since the early 90's and I find that blogs are simply becoming the next domain for media ppl, they are just taking over us.
What do we need? I think it's time for a Union of bloggers, so we can keep track of what blogs are authentic and what is not, I think we need to have some sort of confederation that real bloggers could subscribe to.
Thanks.
James E. Diot
(sorry forgot password -- so anonymous)
I think this boils down to this: do you want to be a big fish in a small pond, or a small fish in a big pond? It use to be that the the size of a potential audience (the pond) is restricted to the natural growth rate (eg TV), but with the internet still on growing exponentially in some areas, it'll take a while yet before this happens. So some bloggers get more attention; that doesn't necessarily mean they'll continue to grow - bandwidth costs money, and you've got to find it somewhere. There will be an equilibrium reached eventually, but unless there's some sort of consolidation happening, this will strictly be a grassroot issue. I good example, not necessarily blogging, would be Matt Drudge.
The world created an underclass of police and law makers whose views (rightly or wrongly in your opinion) are suppressed by the will of the majority. Over time, they grow disatisfied with the system, and revolt the only way available to them... hazerdous driving habits. I'm sure almost everyone has been the victim of unfair police treatment(I know I have), and if you're the victim for too long, you fight back.
Jason Kottke has posted a similar article about Weblogs and power laws. He points to this thread for getting him thinking--and guesses Shirky was inspired there as well.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
The popular people remain popular (if they keep doing what makes them popular) and the unpopular people remain unpopular (unless they stop doing what makes them unpopular).
Yay!
Regardless of how much a particular group of people might prefer anarchy to a societal group the chances that such a form of society maintaining that freedom approach 0 quickly. It is inevitable that someone will be called on to make a decision that will effect the rest of the group at some time. That was the fundamental flaw of Marx's theory. Most humans, by nature, need someone to guide and direct their lives. As a society grows, the need for leaders, or elites, grows as well since it would be all-consuming for each person to know each aspect of what was going on in society. Can you image having to understand all the aspects of society and power structure, even in an area as small as a town? While science has developed a chaos theory, social science seems to follow the reverse. It seems that no matter which society you choose to follow it is eventually going to begin to show power difference, class seperation, and disassociated social networks. All in all I found it very intersting how the bell curve was worked into the discussion. Coming from a math/comp sci background and moving to communications I am always looking for a bridge between the two.
And of course, troll.
The real inequality is user vrs ISP. I don't care if anyone reads what I put up. I DO care that I can't put anything up on my own machines thanks to a lame "no servers" clause in my contract. I'll be happy when I can share what I enjoy and the 200 or so people who might be interested can come see and share what they have. The rest is silly.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Distribution of intelligence in society being more a bell curve than a power law, it is definitely interesting to see the among of traffic this kind of subject drives :
Most of us are unknown pieces of dust
but still...
Most of us have a perfect awareness of it and still don't care
just my 2c
Wouldn't that mean that we need to regard you as a highly repetitive karma whore?
Your contributions to slashdot thus far have been effectively nil. For every good post you have (and there are plenty of those), you counter with completely useless content. Can you imagine a thousand of your posts filling up slashdot?
The people you want to hear will be heard.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
And I'll say it again...
"Equality of Opportunity does not Equal Equality of Results".
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Free speech is a right. Being heard is a privilege.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
I sure wouldn't want my classes graded on a power curve.
At least on a bell curve you can be average and pass.
That's what you get when you try to mix communism with democracy... (see sig)....
A benine dictatorship is the best form of government...
Just checkout the house of Lords.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
A must read for anyone interested in the statistics, fairness, and power relations of blogging.
What the hell does fairness have to do with someone putting up a log? If he doesn't get hits, then it sucks to be him, and he should start putting up interesting information. ANYONE can put up a log. There are numerous companies that provide free webspace. And as for power relations.. If you create something interesting and people like it, you will get more readers. The more readers you have, the more power. Wow, funny how that works.
If this pattern is truly global, then it probably means that a few years the Music world will be pretty much the same as it is now, except without the Recording Industry. People who are predicting the demise of record companies say there will be no more Michael Jacksons, just an amorphous mass of musicians offering their music free on the web and making a living off concert dates. But according to the Power Law, there will be superstars even when the star-making machinery is gone.
...he's described any social system with a large number of participants. At first glance one would think that the World Wide Web and the grand vision of "anyone can be a publisher" would move us away from cliques and one or two very popular entities but the reverse has been true.
For instance, despite how easy it is for anyone to start a Slashdot or Fark ripoff site no one commands as much traffic in their genre as either site. In fact as more people get online, the proportion of those that end up of being Slashbots or Farkheads versus migrating to their "competition" is quite disproportional.
One could also say why despite the fact that the music sharing networks allow anyone to get their music heard by the masses they end up being clogged with the same top 40 shit from the radio from boy bands, Britney Spears and wannabe hip hop thugs.
I just guess that this might be just a by product of human gatherings, even if not in physical terms.
Paraphrasing Lewis: you can't explain, but it is there. You cannot really tell whether you're in or out, but once you're in (or out, for that matter) you can surely affirm it. Once you get there, you realize that there are more people who is more in than you. If your really in, you wish you were out, because being really in usually is not exciting as you once thought when you were out. You cant draw boundaries, but you know who else is in or out. You can push someone out, but it is really hard to get in. It doesnt matter where you are, but you know, and cant explain
That's a genius!
If you continue your analogy with the related article, you'll see how capitalism ends up creating a tightly centralized elite (top-rated posters) that controls the capital (conversation). Through whatever means possible (cash is king, karma is gold) the top people usually have the benefit of either getting in early, or ignoring common morality for their own self-interest. I refer you to our friends at Tyco, Enron, WorldCom, Ford, etc.
Remember that pesky Marx? Thesis, Antithesis, and what was that third stage? Get back to me when it isn't a blatant rip-off of an original idea
Just remember, you're stealing if you don't read all the comments.
Which brings up an interesting question. Do you think that a certain amount of disobedience and rebelliousness by the "betas" against the will of the "alphas" is built into our social structures as human animals? Furthermore, is a certain amount of these things crucial to the functioning of our society? Even more, if the government can some day monitor EVERY one of our activities, sucht that we can't get away with anything...will that take a toll on the mass psychology of our society? Will anxiety, depression, and erratic behavior become even more common place?
The conclusion of the article was that the power distribution curve is a random process.
Given that, there is no meaning we can rightfully attach to this effect (or bloggs for that matter) other than how we want to view the situation.
At a higher level this simply means: Do or do not; there is no try.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
This is way human behavior manifests itself, like it or not. We see it everywhere, not just the net.
I had a friend ask me if I had set up a blog yet, and I told him, "well, I've considered it, but it just seems too much like the 'trend-du-jour'." He jokingly scoffed at me, drawing a comparison between my comment and someone who may have thought that the internet was nothing more than a temporary distraction.
Well, what happens when the economies of scale start to set in, as the article points out? I'd argue that the more prevalent this becomes, the less value it has. One is less likely to encounter 'differently-thinking' participants, or to be confronted with legitimate ideas that challenge the status quo. We can see these dynamics at work in one aspect of our culture that gets discussed regularly here on Slashdot: the music industry: a small number of artists produce a relatively small amount of music that is making a very small number of people very rich. And of course, when I see this happening, I have to start wondering about both motives and the integrity of the artist...popularity has a certain allure to many people, but how willing is an artist (or blogger) willing to sell their soul/integrity in order to reach that objective?
"Stars" aka "lowest common denominator".
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Sorry, but the trolls created their own mess. People get modded down for a reason. Sure, sometimes elitists will mod down a post they don't agree with (asy, almost anything pro-Microsoft) but for the most part the things that get modded down are either stupid, inflamitory, insulting, off-topic etc...
If these people didn't want their posts to get modded down they'd find a contructive soultion to their problems. Say, staying on topic, or abiding by basic rules of etiquette (by saying "I don't agree with your position" rather than "U R a dumass!").
This is not like life where one can born be into poverty. The problems anyone has here are of their own creation.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I don't care WHO reads my journal. My journal is basically for an audience of one...ME. As journals should be. If you like what you read, fine, enjoy. If you don't, you don't.
As far as the "zoo" system...the proof in the pudding is in who has befriended me and who is a "freak" of mine. I basically have a handful of crapflooders as freaks. Whoopee-doo. The folks who have befriended me are with few exceptions people who contribute positively to Slashdot on an ongoing basis.
Sure, I'm not a "superstar" here. Frankly, if nominated for Slashdot superstardom I would not run, and if elected I would not serve. But I try my best to be a good contributor and actually add something to discussions.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Sing along, kids: direct, participatory democracy does not scale.
I've been saying this for years; Clay provides some excellent scientific evidence showing it, and writes about it a whole lot better than I can. Must be why he's further up the curve than I am.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I'm sure almost everyone has been the victim of unfair moderation (I know I have)
:>
Take the good with the bad. I mean, as "Anonymous Coward" you've been modded up quite a bit so far in this thread.
This is not my sig.
Did you use the subject 'Linux' in the hopes some anti-MS moderator would mod you up based on the subject alone? Or is it just co-incidence that 90% of your post use that subject?
Sure, but this is how a good community is made.
A good community, such as K5 or /. is made by discussing a subject, and adding you own insight to the content of the community, and in doing so, contribute to the overall knowledge of everyone, not trolling for mod points.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Your response was probably the most insightful and tempered response I have ever heard on the offtopic political discussions on slashdot.
I cant agree with your point though (except about the die hard flag wavers... I put them in the same category as the die hard sign carrying anti-war protesters)
But I still maintain that the private sector can do anything faster, cheaper, more effeciantly, and of a better quality than the government. Our tax funded schools suck. I have attended both private and public schools and the private ones are far superior. And they do it with less money per pupil than the public schools.
Supply and demand is going to happen regardless of what the government tries to do, and anytime the government does anything, they are messing with supply or demand of something. Schools would be better off if they were all private....
The science fiction writer Asimov wrote some novels on the premise that mass human behavior was scientifically predictable. He called this science psychohistory.
Sociology has swung back and forth with this premise, sometimes thinking lots of behavior can be quanitified, other times thinking little can. I dont think too much of these claims.
It does not, however, necessarily indicate what the most popular weblogs are. Among them are Slashdot (I am not sure how many daily unique visitors but probably order of 1-200K), and Daily Rotten, which gets approximately 75,000 unique visitors per day.
The article here measures linking, and not necessarily readership. Look at their respective Alexa rankings:
Slashdot: 1,179
Something Awful: 5,755
Daily Rotten: 9,738
Metafilter: 14,301
Instapundit: 17,116
Kuro5hin: 17,792
Plastic: 31,134
Scripting News: 34,783
Boing Boing: 36,903
Memepool: 39,492
Robot Wisdom: 52,755
Kottke: 69,473
From, "Tyranny of the Moment" Thomas Hylland Eriksen
A quote from my journal entry:
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Lets hope he chocked on his own drool, and is now dead.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is any of this a suprise to anyone? Haven't we witnessed the same thing with the economic anarchy that we call capitalism? In the free market you have the same thing, with certain people in charge and others clamoring for a few crumbs. The internet and any system that promotes this kind of anarchy will be the same way. That is why we need some kind of democratic structure to be applied, so that the needs of everyone don't get trampled by those of the first few whose only accomplishment was getting there first. The sooner people realize this, the sooner we will have implemented a just society.
Wow. There's a shocker.
--- Ban humanity.
The study talks directly to this "natural" phenomenon you're talking about being a little more systematic than just vanilly free will. In rating type systems like k5, slashdot, advogato, etc. "Superstars" come out of the rating system. It shows how the rating gap wouldn't just be dependent on the quality of the person being rated. Those with high ratings would likely acquire more rating and those with neutral or low ratings would continue to below average into the "power curve." The study hardly talks at all about if this is "fair" or not, but it talks extensively about the momentum of popularity, groupthink, stuff like that. I think it's even more interesting in the momentum-like barriers to entry faced by new entries into the system.
This study is showing that the popular opinion that since everyone can post anything on any system at any time gives them an equal liklihood of being heard is erroneous. Any small imbalance in probability of tending to one site or the other will likely result in the "power curve." People who feel "left out on the Web" don't need to see a psychologist, they are feeling appropriately because the rift between the heards and heard-nots is big. It's not that it's not fair, it's that our misguided notion of if everyone can speak everyone will be heard by someone is misguided in a free system with many choices.
Sorry, but I call BS. If you were only writing a journal for you and you alone, you would not have it on the internet. You want positive responses to your thoughts, otherwise you would keep them private. Which is fine, I don't care, you can do what you want. But don't pretend that you are only writing for yourself when you publish it to the world.
That is my opinion in a general sense. I think people should be able to keep online journals, I wouldn't take that away from them. But on a more personal note, I think publishing journals is kind of dumb, because for the most part the average person has nothing interesting to say. And yes, you probably fall in that category, although most bloggers wouldn't think I am referring to them. I have known people (actual people, not virtual) who do the journal thing online, and they are the kind of people who generally like to talk a lot about nothing interesting. They throw around ideas without thought, pretend to have some kind of interesting writing style, and are pretty annoying. They talk simply for the sake of talking, be it online or in person. The online journal just gives them a worldwide audience to annoy. I know this will offend all you "bloggers" out there, and I do realize that I am posting comments on Slashdot. But this is in relation to a topic, not just me rambling about what I had for breakfast or what I think a really cool invention would be.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
But I submit this, there are always selection rules in effect, both internal and external, conscious and subconscious. People found their way to a particular region. and a particular college. and a particular living space. and so on. Likewise, a sequence of events lead people to a particular online community; whether it be newsgroup, bulletin board or blog.
And the key word here is community. And as such we bring with it all the rules, semi-rules and baggage from our own personal social models. Effective communication and means to reach consensus become increasingly difficult as you add more members. Quickly, you reach a point where it is impossible for everyone to 'assemble' to air their own viewpoints and any meaningful discussion becomes impossible. The signal-to-noise ratio rapidly increases and the only apparently viable method of being heard above the din is to enhance the 'strength' of your output, ie shout. Direct representative political systems work best on a small, local level. As you increase the membership of the system, particular over a geographically-diverse area, the system alligns itself into a hierarchical system (eg, mayors, governors, Representatives, President). Deference in the matter of representation, at least in the US, was to be assigned to one's peers. In theory then, the collective voice of the 'people' would be coalesced into a single voice in Government. Now, whether or not this happens in practice, however, is another matter for discussion.
In the matters of discourse, it is only natural that there emerges a system of trusted 'authorities.' Gurus, teachers, whathaveyou, that again represent the consolidation in a particular area. These are people (or resources) that must be appealed to in order to bring order and structure to discussion. These acquire their credentials through structures created and recognized by the various communities. These 'super nodes' are looked to from many eyes and their voices reach many people simultaneously.
Now, the balkinization of communities is again only natural. A community in general, but an online on in particular, tends to abide by the same effects that others have observed about the internet (web pages, p2p nodes,etc). 'Neighborhoods' asemble around common perceptions, ideas and the overal cohesiveness of the structure. Friendship groups, for instance, ebb and flow in size, generate and dissolve over time. Naturally, if people can't get something from a particular group, they will move elsewhere. And again, as size grows, systems tend to self-organize, collecting around authority figures (in the sense described before) and around certain core beliefs.
In the end though, one shouldn't be surprised at this turn. However, blog-ing communities and the Internet overall do offer a unique advantage: you can always go buffet style, sampling all that various groups have to offer.
This is an ancient debate about how complex systems of society result in an unequal hierarchy. This where the tension between the Greek city state and the Roman Empire is rooted. This is why to this day we argue over which is better, the protection afforded a huge all encompassing political machine, or a localized city government.
This a major point in Plato's Republic, which seeks to find a median way.
It comes up in Gibbons Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, despite his ridiculous conclusion the decadence of the Empire caused its downfall.
Herodotus' The Histories touches on this in a very narrative fashion. The Persian Wars were about this subject long before Rome became an empire. It was a loose collection of city states versus what was then the largest empire in the world.
Of course, we have this debate today in the US and the EU. In many ways, the American desire to maintain peace throughout the world at any cost is what drove the Roman imperial machine to expand beyond the means human organization can cope.
Nietzsche discusses this at times as well.
Anyway, it IS old news. But you are 2000 years too late.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
That is much more descriptive of socialism (which is extremely heirarchical and stratified; as seen in North Korea).
In capitalism, everyone is in charge of their own economic lives. Economic autonomy; people make their own economic decision and determine what is a fair trade with others.
The internet and any system that promotes this kind of anarchy will be the same way. That is why we need some kind of democratic structure to be applied
Democracy is a great way to control government, but should not be used to control personal decisions (including economic ones). Those should be left to individuals, not outside coercive forces.
"so that the needs of everyone don't get trampled by those of the first few whose only accomplishment was getting there first" How many of those who "got here first" are still big and powerful? Yahoo comes to mind, but most of the others that started out back then are long gone and forgotten. Anyone still have a home page on Xoom? Anyone use Pathfinder as a portal?
"C. S. Lewis in an insightful essay intitled "The Inner Ring".....You cannot really tell whether you're in or out, but once you're in (or out, for that matter) you can surely affirm it" "Make Make" by Mike Oldfield
There's no way out no way in
To the hallowed halls
The inner ring
You're just a face
In the crowd
You got no place when you're down and out
Guess this says something about the long-term value of "first mover advantage;" Even though you're first into a market, it doesn't guarantee that you'll stay there.
In a broader sense, I believe what you are describing here is called the "tyranny of the majority." Pure democracy is not desirable, as it can lead to the just what you describe -- "an underclass whose views [or rights] are supressed by the will of the majority". This is why the Electoral College exists, to prevent the tyranny of the majority. (Whether it works is the subject of another discussion.) Pure capitalism works the same way. Left completely unchecked, it leads to monopolies which can be very detrimental to an economy as a whole.
I think this is the purpose that revolution serves -- when concentration of power results in the will of the many being detrimental to enough people, it will be changed. This happens in politics (American civil rights in the 1950s-60s), technology (rise of Linux is an easy example), and many more examples.
--
"Choose again."
Ya, but did Herodotus blog it? Or just write it to some scroll and stick it in a hole?
On a more serious note; you are absolutely right. You will note the various Marxists coming out of the woodwork on this one and posting about how Capitalism sucks because it allows such terrible inequalities. Pure crap, because every socialist system results in 20% of the people holding 80% of the power as well. (Sometimes it is more like 2% of the population holding 100% of the power). It just isn't measured with money. My favorite story about Soviet Russia has to do with phone numbers: It seems you could tell how high someone ranked in the party structure by their phone number; the higher you were the less digits it had. Those on the Politbureau had 3 digit numbers.
We will always see these kinds of inequalities whenever randomness or freedom of choice is applied, making me wonder to what extent those are the same thing. And every attempt to add rules to such a system in order to reduce the randomness (choice) only adds the ability to game (hack) the system.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Malcolm Gladwell has written an excellent book on this phenomena - I highly recommend it. See excerpts at
The Tipping Point
Seems to me these problems of scale are quite common, I recently read Thomas Payne's "Common Sense", and what is being described here sounds an awful lot like the reasoning behind the necessity for representative government, as opposed to a true Democracy.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
If you were only writing a journal for you and you alone, you would not have it on the internet. You want positive responses to your thoughts, otherwise you would keep them private.
Not true. I blog, because I like being able to open up and clarify my thoughts. I have comments disabled - frankly, I don't give a large rat's patootie who reads my blog, if anybody at all besides me does. It's a journal, fer cryin' out loud. You don't write in a journal with the expectation that millions of people are going to read it and suddenly like you. You write in a journal to clarify what's going on in your life, to help you see where you've been, where you're headed, and maybe even spot trends that you may have missed, ways of doing things that always produce bad results. With that knowledge, you might even be able to change.
Sure, you needn't treat blogs the same way I do. You can do with them as *you* see fit - but I, though I be in a very small minority, do not fit your ideas as to why people blog.
Lemon curry?
In the latest issue of "The Mississippi Rag", a periodical on Ragtime and traditional Jazz, there's an interview with John Novacek where he goes on and on about how great Scott Joplin is, with only a passing nod to other composers (Scott, Lamb, Blake, et al.) Ragtime web sites are largely the same way -- they'll have a thorough Joplin section, with MIDI tarballs and such, and only smatterings of everything else. That Chris Ware "Ragtime Ephemeralist" had biographical sections on Scott Joplin, sheet music for "Maple Leaf Rag" and "The Entertainer", along with cursory bits from other composers. There's some big ragtime festival in Sedalia, MO., in honor of Joplin, etc., etc.
For the sorts of people who actually still bother to listen to Ragtime, Scott Joplin is still the main star. His rags were head and shoulders above everyone else's -- simpler, more powerful, catchier. Ragtime enthusiasts are a pretty goddamned marginalized customer demographic, and even they aren't a totally egalitarian crowd. Joplin's still the king.
Apparently she is smarter than we ever thought.
Sorry, I don't buy it. If you wanted to do that, you could easily write in a private journal, in a word processor, in one of the various free journal programs, you could set up your own with password protection, in txt files, or even on good ol' paper. The fact that you chose to do so in a PUBLICLY READABLE journal means that you want people to read it. Otherwise, you would write it in private.
Look, I don't care. To me, it is stupid, but who am I? You can do whatever you want. But why not admit that you want people to read it? At least be honest about it. If it was truly for you, you would keep it to yourself. You are choosing to make it publicly readable for a reason.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You know, it's quite common for people to be interested in what people think about their views, positive or negative. Other points of view can be quite educational, even if you don't agree with them.
I find it surprising that you dismiss all possible alternative explanations as simply being hidden glory-seeking.
For a counter-example to your argument, I write publicly rather than privarely so that if a friend wants to understand me better but is too shy to ask or doesn't know to ask, they can go browse. It seems like a valid enough reason to me, and wholly distinct from the general glory-seeking you claim is universal.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
The "Power Law" would serve as an effective argument against overpopulation. Not that smog, starvation, disease, pestilence, and overall resource depletion aren't credible arguments, this just adds another weight to the scale. With the inevitable increase to the "diversity" parameter that overpopulation would create, overpopulation would only exacerbate the inequalities.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
1. The Political Ideal: Equality vs. Inequality, which advocates celebration of inequality (diversity)
2. Conflicts of Interests, which contrasts individualism and collectivism
From an article on my web site that I wrote sometime last year:
The most interesting question here I think is the extent to which any individual choice can be called "free" when it is so extremely contingent on the choices other people make.
When you "freely" make a choice because 80% of the people also makes that choice, then how free is that?
See title;
.com blogs too; how many do I read? 1. Slashdot and K5 have journals too, but I only read 1 of those,too.
Too many people now-a-days will start a blog/journal/diary/whatever and expect it to instantly become popular. They may write about everything and nothing, about politics and sex and drugs, but they never get really well-read.
Why? Because unless people know who you are, they generally don't care.
Let's pick on Livejournal for a second. It is flirting with 1 million user accounts right now (inluding mine), but how many do I read? Maybe I read about 4; There are thousands of
It should be no suprise that the journals/blogs/etc I read are those of people I feel I have an aquaiantance with, albeit at a distance. I read 'Taco's journal because I know what he did. I read Brad's livejournal because I know what he did; Same with Rusty, jwz and a few others.
But anyone else I don't care about. Why? Because they haven't *done* anything I care about. You may like to write, but don't expect people to read just because you do it. See title.
And I'm not alone; I started a popular internet thing that people use a lot. Suddenly I find names I don't know commenting in my LJ and showing up in my "friends" list, even on my Zoo page here. It's not because they like what I write just for the sake of it, but because they have a point of reference to relate to me on.
That's what it comes down too -- if we can't relate to you, we don't care.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Ok, mostly true, but there are some reasons to have a private jornal publicly accessable.
Try this: I write to and read my journal from home, work, or on the road. The work firewall has a habit of disconnecting SSL conections occasionally. And on the road I'm never sure what type of connection I will find.
There's nothing private in the journal, so I don't mind if others read it. Still, Google hasn't found it yet, and I doubt anyone else has. It's public so I can see it easily. Also, the blog software (I use Blosxom) helps me organize my thoughts: I can catagorize, and it keeps track of the dates for me.
I've checked my blog from the machine it's hosted on instead of just reading the file. It's easier. Public, to me, == easier to find and use. That's all. I can refer to it from any computer with an internet connection. That's useful to me, and why I set it up. If anyone else sees it (or not) I don't care.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I'd like to see Shirky address the cost of information and its effect upon "star" power. People can only invest so much time in determining what's important, relevant or interesting. A shortcut to determining what's important, relevant or interesting is to follow the crowd. This is true even though it frequently yields imperfect results. Suppose you wanted to choose 10 interesting weblogs to read each day out of a total of 10,000. One way of choosing those 10 would be to randomly select a weblog, read it, and then judge for yourself if it's worthy. But a better way to find 10 interesting blogs is to start with the most trafficked blog and work your way down... Popularity may not be conclusive, but it does convey information.
I hope you are not advocating such a policy. For one thing, it skews things even worse, since tax moneys are extorted by the ruling class for their own benefit. If you really want to get rid of the skew, force the wealthy to give to the poor. Not to the greedy rulers.
That's fine, of course, but the original poster asserted that she was writing solely for herself. She implied that she had no "alternative explanations" for putting her journal online.
The problem skeptical folks have with this is that if that were true, there would be no motive to put the journal online. And so why does she do it? She has no other way of keeping a journal except publicly? Unlikely.
You don't need a tethered PC to Blog. All one need is a PDA. There is a LiveJournal client for both the PalmOS and PocketPC OS for example, and probably for the Zaraus as well. And since many of these PDA's have wireless capabilities you can literally blog from anywhere in the world you can get a cell phone signal.
Now I agree that you would have to be an ultimate loser to want to blog right after getting laid, or out in public after some mundane activity but hey, to each his own.
Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to Blog and die.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
True.
However, the reason I blog (and I am sure I am not the only one) is mainly to keep distant friends updated with my life, and the happenings in my city. I don't want millions of people viewing my site because none of my ramblings would mean anything to them. However, it would mean something to those who know me personally. For example if I were to say friend X got married to friend Y, that would mean something to a friend of friend Y, who happens to be in our circle of friends. Think about the close knit of friends you may have had during your college years, but after moving out of college, you lost touch. This is a way for people to still keep track of what friends are up to without mass emailing everyone what is happening all the time. My life generally consists of useless stuff that most people couldn't care less about, but means a lot to those in my close knit of friends.
Wouldn't it simply stand to reason, when all restrictions were removed, that the more capable people would rise to the top? Respectfully, I don't need charts to tell me this. IMHO, using a barometer of "equality" with regards to freedom and diversity is a political interpretation, not a scientific one. On the right wing, you have the "survival of the fittest," and on the left wing you have the "level playing field for everyone."
To say diversity and choice lead to inequality implies that someone's inalienable rights are being violated. Others might rejoice that the proof is in the pudding: when the barriers are removed, the most capable people can rise to the top. To say people are experiencing inequality ignores their potential mediocrity, IMO.
"Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality" in real life, too. Some people think they can just go around and make everyone equal by policy. .Flame
You need a FREE iPod Nano
It may be true that direct, participatory democracy does not scale, but that observation alone doesn't tell us what system is better.
:-)
Direct democracy doesn't work because people don't have the time or desire to decide everything. For the unimportant matters, we would like to delegate our decision to someone else who thinks like us.
The problem with most current systems of government is that we end up delegating too many of our choices. Our current system was designed when voting was expensive, so a few important plebiscites and an election every few years was all the participation that was practical.
I think we can do better now and let every citizen decide what level of participation they want, on each issue. Instead of votes, we should have proxies. We could delegate that proxy to a worthy politician for most routine matters. However, when an important issue comes up, we could either vote ourselves, or delegate the proxy for that issue to someone else. With a bit of work, we could even categorize decisions and delegate social decisions to one politician and economic decisions to another, for example. We may not be individually heard, but if we pick our proxies well, they can express our opinion for us, kind of like Clay could for you
We could certainly do better than our current system, even if pure direct participation is not possible.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
What in the parent was "anti-Semitic?" The Term "Zionist?" If you think so, you need to grow some thicker skin.
As Joseph Sobran so eloquently writes...
"An anti-Semite used to be anyone who hates Jews; now it's anyone the Jews hate."
I tend to agree with the parent that Free Republic has become a cesspool of neocon groupthink in the post-Clinton era. There is zero tolerance on that site nowadays for independent discussion that deviates from the neocon-Christian Zionist party line.
Libertarians and paleo-conservatives were banned long ago or left of their own volition.
The article concludes that, for the most part, the inequality of weblogging is fair, as it stands now. It's still quite easy for any internet user to start a weblog. If the blog is interesting there is still a chance that it can be picked up and become popular because of its content. However, the article also indicates that it is going to get worse. That as time goes on, homeostasis kicks in and the popularity of a weblog will have less and less to do with the quality of its content. I think anyone would agree that losing out on good bloggers or a good article because of the power law is a negative result of having more choice and diversity. If any human social system with sufficient freedom and sufficient diversity will ultimately lead to a power law type of distribution, where quality content, that would, in similar circumstances, be just as popular, doesn't for most of the cases, what do we do about it? Should we just keep moving on to the next more equal system, until it becomes so large as to start the same trend again? Probably not. Oh man, this post didn't work out at all. Anyway, I think that one of the "big, important" goals of human society and research and intelligence should be towards finding ways to level the field as much as possible. Blogging is fair now. But it won't be. Necessarily? The article seems to say so. Is their anything that can keep it honest? Blogging seems like it has much more of a chance then something like wealth distribution. Why does it do better than wealth? Can we take the reasons for why it is more fair to maintain its fairness in the future and apply it to other power law systems like wealth distribution? Or is it doomed as choice and diversity increase? Am I retarded?
But this is in relation to a topic, not just me rambling about what I had for breakfast
Someone rambling about what they had for breakfast is actually more interesting than you'd think.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
You claim that thoughts you don't care who knows should be private?
to quote you (loosely):
Sorry, I don't buy it. If you wanted to do that, you could easily write in a public journal, on one of the various free journal websites, you could even put it on your own website. The fact that you chose to do so in an inaccessible private journal means that you want to hide it from people. Otherwise, you would write it in PUBLIC.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
You should read the book Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs. Average people have a lot of interesting things to say.
Nothing to do with inequality and everything to do with popularity.
And sometimes, just because a person wants to be heard *without* the hassle of having to deal with feedback (positive or negative).
:)
The weblog has kindof replaced the diary in that respect, except for being vastly more public. Instead of writing "Dear Diary", now we write "Hello, World"
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
>But on a more personal note, I think publishing journals is kind of dumb, because for the most part the average person has nothing interesting to say.
of interest to you, maybe.
but in the wide wide world of 6 billion people, if your idea is only of interest to one in a million, there are 6000 interested people out there.
More importantly there are larger groups not being spoken to. More importantly still, how are you supposed to know who has something truly interesting to say other than by encouraging people to speak up?
-pyrrho
", he said, whispering calmly into the storm.
What you have said is The Point.
-pyrrho
Hogwash ... you must have mis-spoken yourself. It's elementary that the sample must be random ... not simple, not easy, but elementary and requisite.
-- When you look to see how the system works, you usually find that it doesn't.
Simply put, diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality
Well duh! Just look at any area where there is choice and diversity and you will see this.
Unfortunately, too many people do not understand this. They shout for equality of outcomes, not realizing that it getting it would destroy diversity and choice. They should be shouting for equality of opportunity, but they oh so rarely do. In a fair race, everyone has equality at the starting line...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I used to run a frequently updated humor website, and most of my traffic were people I knew from the Badassmofo.com forums and people they knew (this was a few years back, before "blogs" as such). This whole deal is really a word-of-mouth phenomenon based on people who trust the opinion of friends, a popular website, etc.
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson
Slashdot is a pretty good example of this curve. This newslink gets posted. Fifty people reply to it. Ten of those replies get positive feedback. Anyone else who reads the topic later in the day will now read only the positive feedback replies, and anyone else who had anything to say, even if it was good and no one was interested in giving it karma, will now go unheard. Of course, as late as I am in typing this reply, it's pretty unlikely that anyone will read it...
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
the problem is that no one person ever does more than a few things worthy of mention in their entire life
That's why we're all here reading a blog.
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
One of the points of the article seems to be that equality of opportunity is a myth. Those who start weblogs today do NOT have the same opportunities that early adopters had.
Similarly, we today lack the economic opportunities that many of our forefather had, laying the foundations of our country. Instead, we're launched into the game with a personally-dependant finite resource supply. Few ever shrink or grow beyond their starting level.
Your statement may be logically correct in itself, but it is not an accurate representation of the world we live in on virtually any level.
I completely agree with you there... in fact, I recently blogged about the issue myself. I kept proper deadtree diaries for years and they have things in them I wouldn't dare breathe to someone I couldn't share a bed with. With regards to "publishing for one person", I just can't buy it. You want to write stuff for yourself, there's your hard drive (or god forbid, paper).
;)
My blog is quite clean compared to my diaries, acting more as an update for friends and people who see my art and might want more of an insight into how I think, without writing me scarymail. (Though in its own way, scarymail is nice too.) Unlike a lot of blogs I've encountered, though, I try not to write several times a day or whine about anything and everything that grabs me. Instead I themed the diary and forced myself to write about food, to space out the entries and get me to think things through before writing it all out.
The results have been interesting at times... I posted a review of a favourite cafe near me and a waitress who worked there replied to it. It turned out that Googling for that cafe actually places my blog entry above the cafe's site.
As to the article, I thought it was quite an interesting read. Unfortunately, as the scale of the group increases further you see these power laws applying to small sections of the society as well as the society in total. If you learn to climb, you keep doing it... if not, you're left behind looking for a way.
Monostatism -- the idea that a person can only be governed by one form of governance -- is a high-ranking, yet fairly unexamined, theory of social control. Let's look at it.
Perhaps this is because governance is -- until now -- geographically based -- you can only be in one place at a time, and hence only have one government. For those who would argue that you are simultaneously subject to both state and federal government -- it's the same centralized, heirarchal "democratic republic" system, isn't it? (assuming location == USA, but also applicable to other DR systems as well.)
You might argue that you could vote with your feet and change your location. But no matter where you go, you are subject to *one* governmental system. You can't find a place where you can *choose* from an array of governmental systems (unless you go to a place where there is *no law at all*, which tends to default to the "law of the jungle" -- again, only one system -- and not a very nice one at that.
If we could decouple governance from geography, and choose our system of governance, we might have competing systems, but each system would be *better* than what we have, because they would be competing for our 'consumption'.
In a sense, that is what we already have [here] in the area of religion: free choice and competing ideologies. And it works: in places where there is only one religious choice, people who choose otherwise are persecuted for not conforming to the primary religious norm.
After all, 'monotheism', while high-ranking, is not the only choice: multitheism [e.g. Hinduism], pantheism [e.g. paganism] and a[nti]theism [e.g. atheism or Buddhism or materialism or humanism] also have their adherents.
Analogically, only two forms of "anti-monostatism" come to mind: "libertarianism" and "anarchy". Even those terms can only be defined relative to *some* form of statism and one merely argues for limited monostatism. "Multistatism" and "panstatism" don't seem to have any other words to describe them.
Since "governance" is just as arbitrary a social construct as "religion", how do we get from "here" to "there"? Is it possible? Is it time for monostatism to go into the dustbin of history as the only form of governance possible?
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The real problem is in identifying sites. Spidering follows power laws, even if the search itself is neutral. That's because it follows the link structure, which follows the power laws. I don't see any way around it. If you -- or your spider -- don't know that a site exists, you can't check it out. And everybody who can tell you about gets their information from sources governed by the same power laws.
Shirky's synopsis of the theoretical network results misses, or glosses over, this point -- the papers I've read make the very reasonable assumption that the odds of picking up a given new reader are proportional to the number of readers you already have.
It's also quite possible that she has no motive not to put the journal online.
I think you missed my point, or maybe I veered off. I was arguing that someone who writes in a public journal and says "I write it only for me and me alone" is fooling themselves. I don't understand the desire to just write down my thoughts on a regular basis (journal) and have others read them. But if you want to do it, knock yourself out. But at least say "hey, I want to share my thoughts with the world".
I think for the most part people who write in public journals are seeking any kind of attention they can get. (naturally, there will be exceptions) But I think the signal-to-noise ratio is extremely low when it comes to online journals.
So some people will say "hey, you are commenting in a blog right now, idiot!". I think there are two distinctions to be made. On sites like this, people comment on topics. I like it, I get to hear other people's opinions on specific things that interest me, and that I think deserve discussing. Online journals, where people just blather on about nothing absolutely bore me. I still don't believe that people write in publicly accessible journals just for themselves. Like you said, you want others to be able to read it if they want.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
...but desirable.
/. reader could post front-page stories? And everyone could edit them? What if everyone had editorial mod powers?
Imagine and world where all are equal, in the same way that A = A. I don't want to live there, not even in cyberspace, do you?
But you don't even have to take equality to an absolute to see what a terrible idea it is. What if every
The argument for inequality need not be made from the traditional elitist/aristocratic/etc position. Inequality is simply part of human nature, and one should endeavor to understand it before decrying it as "unfair".
That's not true. Democratic forces have a severe dampening effect on concentration of power. As soon as enough people realize their power is being taken away, they simply vote for it to be given back.
How about giving Democracy a try? It has a severe dampening effect on concentration of power. Why do you guys always bring up socialism any time someone criticizes capitalism? Is your thinking that narrow-minded? Has your world been reduced to only those two options? Are you trying to live up to the reputation that Americans have for being uneducated and ill-informed? A good question to ask yourself is why the people in control of our society have reduced the choice between economic systems down to two, and now that socialism has self-destructed, cheered about the fact that there is supposedly only one? Are you dumb enough to believe that people in big business push the present form of capitalism because it is good for you? Do you really think they are looking out for your interests?
What you misunderstand about power laws is that they only describe systems of pure anarchy. The problem with systems that have no regulation is that eventually people start getting extremely pissed off as a disproportionate amount of power leaves their hands. Since you are referring to history, you will understand that if power becomes statified enough, eventually a revolution will occur and leave people hanging from lamp posts. And, since you are such a student of economics, you probably already know that wealth concentration is occuring in the US at an alarming rate. The top 1% of the US population owned 33% of the total wealth of the nation in the 1980s, and that has shot up to over 40% by the late 90s, and it's still rising. By contrast, the bottom 40% only own 1% of the wealth. This is where many revolutions start. The function of Democracy is to prevent this from happening. Unforutnately, we have a very limited form of Democracy that is being drowned out by our economic system.
The truth is that you can design any system you want. The thing that it needs is an outlet for the people to voice their needs to government and have them addressed. The other thing that it needs is fair distribution of power and resources as well as opportunity. I would much rather live in a system where:
1. There is true democracy rather than the corporate sponsored plutocracy that we have right now.
2. People are rewarded for work, not for "figuring out the system".
3. Power is distributed in an even manner so that everyone has a voice in society.
Why change a criticism of capitalism into a pro-socialist arguement?
It's a nice trick, but it's a bit deceiving. Has it ever occured to you that there are other ways of doing things?
Don't you know that criticisms of capitalism have sprung up in the US since it's very inception? Don't you know that this is nothing new, and that there is nothing "Anti-American" about criticizing the excesses that capitalism creates?
I agree that a dictatorship is a bad idea, but isn't that one of those statements that goes without saying? I mean, why are you even wasting time pointing out the obvious? Who the hell have you ever met that has promoted a dictatorship over democracy? You know, you can mix socialism with democracy, and you can mix capitalism with dictatorship, and all sorts of other choices and economic systems that you haven't heard of. It amazes me how people here in the US like to boil it down to such a limited number of choices, when the reality is that the choices are wide open.
'k, I can buy that. I just wanted to say there can be other real reasons to have a public journal and it isn't necessarily dumb, so don't dismiss them all outright.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
You really aren't doing yourselves any favors by not reading. You should try picking up a book every once in awhile, and you'd find out that socialism is very different than what we have seen in practice, and the same goes with capitalism.
Yes, ideally capitalism is economic freedom, but then again, using the same criteria that you are, we could also say that the feudal system was freedom of contract, and that slavery also represents freedom of contract. In fact, one of the big blemishes in our history that no one wants to admit to is that capitalism and freedom of contract logically extend to slavery. After all, if we put property rights and freedom of contract above all else, then what right would a government have to limit slavery? Shouldn't one be "free" to be a slave? The reality is that heavily favoring certain kinds of freedoms over others can quickly develop into a society where there is very little freedom. The thing that needs to be remembered is that all oppressive systems have developed out of a free state. Even China and the former USSR developed out of societies that were at one point free(during their revolution). The fuedal system, again, developed out of societies that were at one point in time free. The biggest enemy of freedom is not the imposition of rules that limits the amount of power that an individual has. In fact, rules are necessary to guarantee freedom for everyone. The biggest enemy of freedom is a society that allows for unnecessary hierarchies and power centers to form. We have that in our current version of capitalism. Power has become extremely concentrated, and it interferes with the freedom of opportunity of others.
Another thing that you need to do is look up the word fascism in the dictionary. I really don't wish to educate you on the differences between economic systems. This is very disheartening to try to have an intelligent conversation with someone that confuse fascism, dictatorship, socialism, and democracy with each other.
The problem with free market anarchy isn't that I have a problem with freedom. The problem is that hierarchies naturally develop. Have you ever been inside a corporation? Do you feel free? It's run in top-down authoritarian fashion, is that freedom?
You: It's elementary that the sample must be random
Celandro: The validity of a random statistical sampling
Celandro's phrasing itself implies that the sampling is random.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Baby #1 is born with a defect that leaves him crippled for life.
Some birth defects don't pose a practical problem. Even being born without legs may not; there exist numerous adaptive devices in today's world.
Baby #2 is born normal.
Define "normal". The only objective definitions for "normal" that I can think of are the orthogonal vector to a surface and the Gaussian statistical distribution.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You claim that those who can't find alternatives to lousy major-label music are "part of the problem." Well, how do you expect anybody to solve it? If you expect people to write and perform their own music, how do you expect amateur songwriters to make sure that they don't make the same mistake George Harrison made?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Couldn't we just drop all the kids into a big meat grinder, like in The Wall ...?
-kgj
Man, oh, man.
Marketing isn't committing voting?
(political) Careermaking isn't committing voting?
Lobbying isn't committing voting?
Rigging regulations, laws, taxes, awareness, behaviour, context, civil 'reality' toone can't possibly be that naïve...
As for the earlier comment ( about socialism being The Sedimentary Lifestyle, and capitalism being dynamic .. I believe that dynamism is a phase that civilization/society goes through ( hence them damned periodic revolutions, going 'round and 'round, that way and this ), and stratification/calcification is what happens after the dynamic phase... look at Hitler's dynamic-at-the-beginning group/society, it got rigid, just as ours is now getting, and did-it quicker than ours does, but that's because reasonably pure fascism short-circuits/annihilates community efficiently...
Socialism's 'capital' is belonging-force ( or belonging-enforcing )
Capitalism's 'capital' is Economic Position ( conjunction of money +image +social-position +title, or one's worth is how much of 'others' is worth-less-than-oneself )
'Society's 'capital' is social-awareness's seeming/saying... ( hence the fashion-scene: it doesn't matter whether society's 'seeming/saying' is valid or not, just that it is saying is sufficient )
Civilization's 'capital' is .. what, concerted ignorance-force? .. enforcing, yet hating/opposing community-including -and- being open and unitary, simultaneously... ( comical, that particular bit, machine-part's good because then one has no responsibility, and community-among's bad, because it requires relationship-awareness. Gutless..? ), assumed authority ( what guy-culture calls 'BS' ), .. objects instead of being+way... the whole pattern of it...
I'm thinking of the conjunction of beaurocratic-rigidity, ignorance-of-all's-worth [ or (some)-one's worth, rather than enforcement/authority-'worth', nuqular family or otherwise ], the being in-love-with being-part-in-one-machine
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )