[P2P-F] Why all men are not created equal : Study on Social Hierarchy

[Mark Adam]

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