<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 8:14 PM, Kevin Flanagan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kev.flanagan@gmail.com" target="_blank">kev.flanagan@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<a href="http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120713-why-all-men-are-not-created-equal/2" target="_blank">http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120713-why-all-men-are-not-created-equal/2</a><br><br>"David-Barrett and Dunbar discover a particularly intriguing
implication for our information age. One of the important factors in
their model is the <em>cost</em> 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,</blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div>�</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> 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.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><p>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."</p></blockquote><div>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.�</div>
<div><br></div><div>markj</div></div>