Bling Bling in the ATL

I recently did a non-formal lit review of writing about internet discussion boards. I found that most of the scholarly writing is practical application research in 3 categories:

1. Healthcare: do online forums help educate patients and thereby impact care.. can you deliver preventative care over the internet
2. Education: effective uses of tech in education
   
3. Poly Sci: political ramifications (change party/issue organizition, affect patterns in civic discourse, impact voting patterns)

Within each of these theres a subsection of 'the medium is the message' type stuff where you can look at the tech determinants of a medium or forum (text based, no login, light moderator presence) and comment on the type of dialogues that creates and prevents.

Strictly theoretical writing on the internet - by people who are merely curious about the nature of these types of forums who aren't looking for practical applications - are rarer (Its official: hypertext is dead!) Most of the theoretical writing is closely related to the practical application people, and covers...

1. effects of structural components: eg. the blurring of geographic, written/spoken, public/private and the real/the virtual boundaries
2. behaviors: ‘hostility’, ‘self-presentation’ and ‘support’.

Yesterday I saw a funny article falling into this last genre by Ignatius from WaPo. Connectedness and conflict has gotten a lot of play in the blogosphere, probably in part because it cites Fukayama's recent break with neo-con foreign policy. Its one of two articles I've read recently that use a materialist(?) argument for why the internet spreads inequality. Ignatius writes...

[Raja Sidawi] argues that Barnett misses the fact that as elites around the world become more connected with the global economy, they become more disconnected from their own cultures and political systems. The local elites "lose touch with what's going on around them," opening up a vacuum that is filled by religious parties and sectarian groups, Sidawi contends. The modernizers think they are plugging their nations into the global economy, but what's also happening is that they are unplugging themselves politically at home.

I guess the unspoken assumption is that only the local elites have access to the internet - thus participation in the globalized economy is simply another mark of class divisions. Ignatius follows up by citing another trend in internet theory - that the medium implicitly enhances certain behaviours, namely, rage - by decontextualizing events, images, etc., and enhancing proximity.

Interesting, but nothing new. There are a million different examples I could give to break down this theory - that the internet sows discord and inequality, rather than acting as an equalizing force, but I won't. Instead, I'll add a little social network theory to further Ignatius's claims.

The other article I read was about the A-list blogs. And if I could find it, I would link it, but I can't, so here's this. Basically, it looks at the graph of blog traffic, or blog links - which follows a power-law distribution, and explains this finding with social network theory.

Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers like Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, and Bernardo Huberman among others, breakthroughs being described in books like Linked, Six Degrees, and The Laws of the Web, we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.

So, popular blogs like TalkingPointsMemo become more popular, and unpopular blogs (like mine) stay where they are.

My conclusion unfortunately is completely borrowed from BIB's dis, and I don't want to give away his ideas and have people STEAL them. So I guess I'll sit on that until the damn book is published.

Ciao,

- Ms. Bling