Joi Ito's Web

Joi Ito's conversation with the living web.

Three Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Blogging – Marko's Reply to Clay »

Joichi Ito
Jan 18, 2004 - 06:29 UTC »

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Marko points out three mistakes in the moral mathematics of blogging that Clay has been writing about and articulates very clearly some key weaknesses in the arguments.

Continue reading Three Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Blogging – Marko's Reply to Clay.
Marko
The first mistake – lets call it the “Natural Social Institutions” view – is the simplistic but widely held view that the patterns resulting from the operation of freely forming networks are acceptable because the rules of operation of these networks are in some sense natural.
[...]
The second mistake – lets call it the “Links from Nowhere” view – claims that link choices are made under full information about available options and fully formed values or preferences over those options. We should also reject this view. Autonomous linking choices are always informed by incomplete information and incomplete values and preferences. There are in fact no links from nowhere.
[...]
The third mistake – lets call it the “Forced Compensation” view – claims that the only way to address the unacceptable degree of inequality that results from the operation of a freely forming network is to “force” people to change their linking behavior. This is a far too narrow view of the means available to influence the distributions that arise.
Marko ends by asking some more questions about justice.
Marko
What arrangements of inequality are preferable over others from the point of view of justice? How do we justify to each other the rules, architectures and tools we adopt in the blogging world?

In answering these questions we should look back to understand the present. John Rawls put the task description well: “The task is to articulate a public conception of justice that all can live with who regard their person and relation to society in a certain way. And though doing this may involve settling theoretical difficulties, the practical social task is primary.”

A public conception of justice for freely forming networks. That could be our shared goal.

You should read the entire entry on Marko's blog.

   
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perl on Nokia phones? »

Joichi Ito
Jan 18, 2004 - 05:52 UTC »

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Perl on Nokia phones? Sounds cool to me!

via skimpizu

   
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Inequality and the role of "fitness" in power laws »

Joichi Ito
Jan 17, 2004 - 23:41 UTC »

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I've been trying to push against Clay's assertion that blogs exhibit a power law and that power laws cause inequality. You can't "fix" the system without breaking it. We've gone back and forth in different places and I THINK I've boiled it down to a few key points for me.

Continue reading Inequality and the role of "fitness" in power laws.

When Clay uses the word "inequality" he means "not the same" and indeed, in a fair system, the outcomes will usually be inequal. I won't argue with that. What my question was was whether the rules were fair and whether we could counteract the current bias towards those in positions of privilege and amplify those opinions that are currently underrepresented.

I think the notion of trying to modify or influence the system to push it towards a particular outcome sounds like regulation and hits a negative chord with the free market libertarian types on the Net. I am also against unnecessary regulation. However, I do think that we can and should try to influence the architecture to push towards an outcome that we believe in. I think this is the nature of politics.

Clay talks about the power law in his paper, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality. As most of you are aware, power laws are a type of distribution exhibited by large networks that grow where people are allowed to link freely. Since new sites tend to link to sites that already exist or are famous, the links aggregate to the well known sites making the "rich richer". The power law shows that even with fair rules, the outcome will be very inequal.

Recently, Marko and I blogged about blogs and justice in the context of the power law. Clay recently blogged this:

We can and should talk about the type of inequality we want — right now, for example, most of the high-flow webloggers are men. We can ask why that is, whether we should do anything about it, and if so, what? We can’t ask how we can level out the difference between the high-flow end of the popularity curve and the rest of us, or at least we can’t ask that unless we are advocating the destruction of the blogosphere. The interesting and hard question is “Since there is to be inequality, how shall it be arranged?”

I think we are going to see an explosion in work designed to alter the construction and effects of this inevitable inequality (viz Sifry’s experiments on moving recent blogs up the Technorati list) and I am optimistic about this change, as I believe the concentration of real thought and energy on what is actually possible, as opposed to cycles wasted on utopian declations, will be tremendously productive.

So I'm glad Clay is willing to consider what we might do about the fact that the most influential blogs are by people in positions of privilege.

In Linked Albert-Laszlo talks a lot about power laws and makes a few interesting points. First of all, power laws on the web make two assumptions, that the network is growing and that people tend to link to sites that have the most links. Laszlo cites work by Paul Krapivsky and Sid Redner from Boston University, working with Francois Leyvraz from Mexico,

generalized preferential attachment to account for the possibility that linking to a node would not be simply proportional to the number of links the node has but would follow some more complicated function. They found that such efforts can destroy the power law characterizing the network.
He goes on to talk about Google coming in as a latecomer in the search game and how "fitness" or the likelihood that someone will link to you is not entirely determined by your existing position on the power law curve and that a site worthy of connecting to can quickly scale the power law curve if it exhibits exceptional fitness. All disruptive technologies and innovations break power law curves by exhibiting exceptional fitness.

If you think about the power law as themes or ideas instead of people and you think about fitness as the level in which an idea resonates with people, the power law could be viewed as an amplifier for ideas and memes that are sufficiently interesting. Because fitness so influences a nodes ability to climb the power law, I think the notion that I described in the Emergent Democracy paper, where the tail of the curve is where the creativity happens and the power law is how an idea whose time has come goes main stream still makes sense. I think the key to making the system "fair" is to make sure the tail is as inclusive as possible and to try to encourage technology and norms to value fitness over simply linking to those who are popular. As Ross shows in his three layers of creative, social and political, I think the power law is the final amplification part. In fact, the tail of the power law, the creative layer and the social layer where the initial deliberation occurs might be where we should be focusing our energies.

I have a feeling that the blog power law is like a real-time amplifier. I think it is key to note that nodes that lose the fitness that got them there in the first place retire very quickly and that fitness is amplified in scale-free networks. If we architect blogs to allow the amplifier to be sensitive to positive fitness and quickly retire irrelevant blogs, it will be a good amplifier. If the Technorati top 100 is the Marshall amp, maybe we should be talking about the guitar?

   
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Off to Helsinki »

Joichi Ito
Jan 17, 2004 - 09:32 UTC »

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I'm at Narita airport about to leave for Helsinki. Hawaii -> Tokyo -> Helsinki is really traveling in the wrong direction. I'll see you all on the other side...

   
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Cato gets it wrong in their analysis of Dean Net policy »

Joichi Ito
Jan 17, 2004 - 06:29 UTC »

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David Weinberger describes how the Cato Institute's analysis of the Dean Net policy is wrong.

   
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Global crackdown on profanity »

Joichi Ito
Jan 16, 2004 - 06:09 UTC »

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Michael Powell wants to crack down on profanity in the US and the Brazilians arrest this pilot (via antti) for flipping them the finger. "He made an internationally known obscene gesture when he was being photographed by the Federal Police," according to the article. With all of the increased reason for profanity directed against establishment, I can see how a global war on profanity is essential for the security interests of the civilized world. :-p

   
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We may owe our speech and our existence to dogs »

Joichi Ito
Jan 15, 2004 - 21:44 UTC »

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In my pursuit to understand Bo better, I'm reading a book that Barak gave me called How to Speak Dog. It's really a great book about how to to communicate with your dog. Stanley Coren makes an interesting assertion about our co-evolution with dogs.

Stanley Coren
It is well established that the primitive humans who survived to become our forefathers formed an early relationship with dogs. Compare our success to that of the Neanderthals, who never got along with dogs, and who ultimately died out. Some evolutionary theorists have suggested that the survival of our ancestors had to do with the fact that our cooperative partnership with dogs made us more efficient hunters than Neanderthals2. With the dog's more acute sensory systems, finding game was easier.
[...]
Here is where the serious speculation begins. These theorists suggest that since these early humans now had dogs to do the tracking, they no longer needed the facial structures that would allow them to detect faint scents. This, then, allowed our early ancestors to evolve more flexible facial features, which were capable of shaping more complex sounds. In other words, our prehistoric association with dogs, who would do the smelling for us, gave us the ability to create speech.
[...]
2. J.M. Allman, Evolving Brains. New York: Freeman, 1999.
Thanks Bo!

   
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graffiti archaeology »

Joichi Ito
Jan 15, 2004 - 21:17 UTC »

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Very cool work by Cassidy Curtis.

Graffiti Archaeology is the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The grafarc.org project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of San Francisco graffiti taken by many different photographers from 1998 to the present.

Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some of San Francisco's classic spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years.

via danah boyd (her site is down right now)

   
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Fernanda's blog survey »

Joichi Ito
Jan 15, 2004 - 07:25 UTC »

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Fernanda in the Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Lab is doing a blog survey. If you're a blogger and have time, please fill it out.

   
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RIAA's fake cops harrass based on racial stereotypes »

Joichi Ito
Jan 14, 2004 - 17:48 UTC »

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And even more racism...

Kevin Marks
RIAA's fake cops harrass based on racial stereotypes

LA weekly story:
'A large percentage [of the vendors] are of a Hispanic nature,' Langley said. 'Today hes Jose Rodriguez, tomorrow hes Raul something or other, and tomorrow after that hes something else. These people change their identity all the time. A pictures worth a thousand words.'
Langley is Western regional coordinator for the RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit.
I feel sorry for Sir Howard Stringer. I'm glad I don't have to hang out with people like the RIAA. (tech dirt on how Sir Howard might save Sony Music)

I wonder just how much racism in the name of "profiling" will be tolerated. Since the RIAA links piracy to terrorism, I suppose they'll expect us to tolerate a lot.

   
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