On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Kevin Flanagan <[email protected]>wrote:
> > http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120713-why-all-men-are-not-created-equal/2 > > "David-Barrett and Dunbar discover a particularly intriguing implication > for our information age. One of the important factors in their model is the > *cost* of communication: how hard it is to exchange information. It’s > often suggested that by lowering the cost of communication, electronic > networking will make it easier for everyone to access information and so > will flatten the social hierarchy. The researchers find that, Correlation does not equal causation. I think those researchers will find that after the legal system judged (almost completely) in favor of wealthy plaintiffs (RIAA vs. 17year-old, etc), the egalitarian nature at the heart of the Internet dramatically got stifled after Napster, for example. > if there is an initial inequality in how information is distributed, > lowering communication costs counter-intuitively sustains this steep > hierarchy and promotes inequality. There’s less incentive to spread > information around: you can just keep on looking until you find it. Big media doesn't want to "spread information around" -- it wants you to go to their sites. Unfortunately, the lawsuits mentioned above was a big blow to p2p, so now we have this rather stagnant internet where most of people's time is on less than 1% of the net. > If we want to avoid this effect of cheaper communication, they say, then > we’ll need ways of compensating for it – for example, by greater social > investment in education to disseminate knowledge. The web won’t do it for > us." > This is an example of a reporter who doesn't know how to do the research well enough. As I said, it's not an effect of cheaper communication, it's purely an inadvertant correlation. markj
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