Aaron Swartz - The Network Transformation

http://q.gs/3GggL

San Francisco, April 2007 // Categories: networks, search
Here Swartz describes the nature of the shift from centralized one-to-many systems, such as broadcast television, to the decentralized many-to-many topography of network communication. The end of scarcity in transmission capacity poses the question of how to finance information production and how people can find their way through the abundance; search engines and collaborative filtering mechanisms have become both essential tools and points of control. These systems paradoxically exercise a renewed centralizing influence due to the social entrenchment of the 'hit' phenomenon. Can technical design help to counteract this tendency?

The change in the architecture of the media
is completely connected to a change of the control

With the broadcast system you have one person in one station

deciding what gets put out over the airwaves.

When you have distributed network like the internet everybody can be a server.

There's no distinction between the broadcaster and the receiver:

every computer does both.

You can take your home laptop and run a server off of it that can distribute movies and music

and webpages and email in the same way that the biggest computers at google can.

there's no fundamental difference between the computers they have in iraq in their server rooms

and what you have on your desk

In the old system of broadcasting,

you were fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves

you could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves in television

or even with cable you had 500 channels.

On the internet, everybody can have a channel;

everyone can get a blog or a MySpace page;

everyone has a way of expressing themselves

and so what you see now is not a question of

who gets access to the airwaves,

it's a question of who gets control

over the ways you find people.

You start seeing power centralising in sites like google,

these sort of 'gatekeepers' that tell you where on the internet you want to go

the people who provide you your sources of news and information.

so its not only certain people have a license to speak

now everyone has a license to speak,

it's question of who gets heard.

So one of the biggest questions we're facing in a world of many speakers

how do you find what's good?

Are we gonna go to a system like the old media where you go to CNN

and they pick a handful of people to focus on

and you read what they say

or are we going to go with something more like the internet

where everybody has a chance of being heard, a more democratic system.

One of the most interesting technologies for doing something like that

is a system called collaborative filtering,

where everybody expresses their opinions on what they like and what they don't like

and the computer tries to match you up with other people who have similar preferences

and recommend you things that they also like that you didn't know about before.

It's the same kind of system you see on Amazon

where people who bought this book also bought this book

people are trying to experiment that not only with books

but with blogs, web pages and news stories all across the internet,

they're trying to find ways and things that you've never heard of before

and bringing them in front of you

Mass media had this fundamental paradox

because it was aiming at a huge audience

but it wanted to convince everybody they were an individual

you see all these ads on television all the time like

'buck the trend, buy these jeans' right!?

and it's on a show that 4 million people are watching,

you're not going to buck a trend by doing what 4 million other people are.

Now that the internet is actually making these nitch things possible

the mass media is incredibly threatened

no longer this idea of bucking the crowd and being your own

it's no longer just a theory you can actually do it on the internet

And what we're starting to see is tools that take power away from the big conglomerates

and start to distribute it to small groups.

And so there are a bunch of issues in a system like that there are questions of funding you know,

how will these small groups get paid and how will the random blogger be able to live

in a way that an investigative journalist can now

because there's one giant source of advertising

you know there are question finding people, how will I be able to find the stuff I'm interested,

and the stuff that's trustworthy and reliable

and so for each of these there are new technologies

people are trying all kinds of different things

and all of these say different things about the internet

there is still experimentation in this, since everybody can just go up and start a website

with a new piece of technology that try and solve one of these problems

We're seeing lots of different possibilities, lots of different funding models

lots of different recommendations systems and who knows what will work best

we have a chance to try it all and see what falls out

So there are a couple of interesting funding models:

One of course is this standard model of advertising,

you go to a bunch of big corporate sponsors and instead of having them fund a television show

you have them fund your webpage

but a more interesting one is you do the same thing with nitch groups

instead of going to IBM/Ford or a big company, and having them buy a banner on your website

you go to people that actually care about the readers you have

if you're a design weblog you go to design companies

if you're a political blog, you go to other politicians

you have a very targeted narrow group of people who are really interested in the subject,

thats an audience advertisers really love

another possibility is to turn directly to your readers for support

you see blogs say, I wanna go to a trip to New Hampshire

to cover the american political conventions

will you support me?

and the readers pour in money

these people are very dedicated they feel like they have a personal connection

with the person writing

they are eager to spend money to support it!

Another thing is that you simply work of volunteer labor

you have people that have a day job thats an expert in a subject

and they just enjoy talking about it so they rate stuff in their free time

and publish it on the internet

or they have readers who read their site and contribute stuff

and it gets compiled into one exciting source.

So I think there are lots of interesting experiments,

people are trying lots of different ways

One of the errors you had with television, right, could only provide one level of interest

it was funded based on adertising not on how much people cared about the programme

advertisers were going to pay the same no matter how exciting or how compelling

or how interested an audience was in a show

so what you ended up with was fairly boring shows that appealed to lots of people

because that's what advertisers wanted

they wanted lots people watching the shows

whereas in a normal market economy what happens is

if you really want something you pay more for it

you just can't do that with television.

So one of the interesting things about broadcast is that a lot of what you like

depends on what other people like

there are only so many shows out there

they are all kind of bland

so what happens, you have these megahits

like American Idol or lost, where everybody at the water cooler is talking about this show,

so you have to watch it because otherwise you can't keep up with them

whatever social factors get involved

you have this sort of process of rich gets richer

one thing takes off because thats what everybody else is doing!

One nice thing about the internet is that it allows for so much more variety

that nitch products can get so much more attention and interest

So they've the run the numbers and this this proven mathematical fact

that as long as some percentage of what you care about is whether other people

like it or now you're gonna end up
with this patterns of hits and failures

if you have two things which are equivalent in quality,

one of them is liked by one more person
than the other one,

you're going to go that one

there's some small chance that you're going to go to that one

and everybody's going to start going to that one

and all of a sudden you have harry potter

this one book plucked of nowhere that suddenly becomes this massive mega-hit.

not because it's a hundred million times better written than every other book

but simply because everybody's reading it

and putting stuff on the internet doesn't change that,

you still care about what your friends like, still wanna read what everybody else is talking about,

ou still wanna do what's popular because you think maybe other people have a valid opinion

and maybe you wanna talk to them about it
maybe you want to join part of this community

but whatever your reason is,
as long as you care about what other people opinion

you're going to end up with these hits.

You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about

You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about

everybody's watching American Idol
doesn't matter how good the show is

I mean it has to be somewhat decent so people watch it,
but once everybody's watching it,

talking about it, you know,
it suddenly becomes this megahit for no real reason,

right, just because it's a social phenomenon

and what television does, it chops off the tale and it throws away all the other shows

people would like but don't care enough about to be megahits

and instead pours all of its money into these cheap produced shows

well you can't get rid of hits, right

it's a fact that people would wanna do what their friends are doing

you can't avoid that but what you can do is say
there's the whole rest of the world out there

there's a whole rest of what people care about other than what everybody else is doing

Everybody has their own particular interests everybody has something that fascinates them

and what the internet does is it allows them to 'do' that

to get involved and find other people who share these things

one of the exciting things about Wickipedia
is that it doesn't just have articles on

you know, 100 most popular things or 1000 most popular things

you can pick the most obscure subject in the world
and there's an article about it

Because for EVERYTHING,
there's someone who cares a great deal about it

and that's what television,
that's what radio doesn't provide, but the internet does!

it provides a way for you to get in touch
with those other people who really

care about this completely obscure thing

It doesn't just go into the direction of topic,
it goes into the direction of time

You can go back in time and find all the shows that have been canceled

find all the articles that have been deleted

you can go back and find everything that has been lost in major culture

and it's got a place on the internet

Youtube music videos from the 70s and the 80s
that you can't find anywhere these days

you can watch at your leisure

I think lessening the power of the hits

bringing down the things from the top
and making it more egalitarian

is the something we should always strive for

it may be really difficult it may not be super possible

but it's something to hope for, to drive for

and what that means is

throwing away as much as possible all the things that give you hints about

you should do this because other people like it

it's very tempting
when you're building a website or programming system

is to start sorting things that are really popular at the top

but all that does is, that it makes it less democratic and less fair

you have to have continual pressure,
to try and pull things from the bottom from the tale up

give everybody a chance to look at everything and if you do that

maybe, you won't get completely rid of hits,

but you can start to ???? some of their problems

I mean that's one power of data mining
is that construct to find obscure subjects

that you wouldn't have found
simply because they are not popular

you know one of the tools of recommendation

can be to pull you to the less popular stuff on the tale

The random article button on Wikipedia
is really cool in this sense

you can just wake up every day
and read about some completely random topic

that you never heard of except for the fact
that there's an article on the Wikipedia about it

and boy are there some completely random topics on Wikipepdia