On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Kevin Flanagan <kev.flanagan@gmail.com> 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