Information Versus Diversity

[koganbot]

William Bowers (in reference to Tinysong and Twisten.fm, "which combine to crawl Twitter for music")(Puritan Blister #43 Twisten to Yr Heart): Isn't it a tad more populist/democratic than Hype Machine even, because your users are mostly "folks," right, which is not to give bloggers too much status/esteem, but some of 'em are getting royalty-esque. Not in the sense of money-royalties, but 'tude, maybe?

My question here is, what does Bowers* mean by "populist/democratic"? Is what the populace pays attention to inherently populist/democratic simply because the populace pays attention to it? One could argue that Twisten gets rid of traditional gatekeepers, going straight to the people for its information.** But one could also then argue that the Twisten results become gatekeepers themselves. My buzzword here is "cumulative advantage," which just means that that which is somewhat popular has a huge leg up in becoming more popular, and this is merely because it's popular (above and beyond its inherent appeal), and that which is little-known remains little-known. So the more information that flows about how much people listen, the less diverse the listening will get over space and time. As the world gets more cosmopolitan, it gets less diverse, even if individually we become more aware of the diversity that does exist. - I'm not committing myself to what I just said, by the way. I'm making arguments, creating hypotheses.

Democracy doesn't just mean "majority rules," it also depends on diversity, depends on there being diverse people with diverse opinions; otherwise we wouldn't need to vote, we could just poll a single individual and let those results decide for everybody. And its rationale is that, with access to the diversity of ideas (rather than just ideas coming from the top down), the people get to debate and choose which ideas are best, and they get to experiment with new ideas. So the flow of information is critical to democracy, since it's critical that diverse ideas be heard; but also, owing to cumulative advantage, the flow of information cuts down on diversity. (Same caveat as before about not altogether committing myself to this argument.)

*If you click the link, you'll see that Bowers is actually VERY skeptical about the benefits of new media.

**And I'd hypothesize that The People chose to use gatekeepers, and chose their gatekeepers, in the first place.

h/t freakytigger

Comments

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I hate these kinds of articles, because they invariably take a decent point and then ruin it by being stupid and hysterical. Does anyone in the actual world -- anyone outside of columnists writing columns about Twitter -- actually think that 140-character tweets will become our only form of writing? That people will stop composing essays and speeches and novels now that they've discovered the pleasure of 140 characters? That the owners of Twitter will take over the world and force us to engage in a 140 Characters' Hate, and the Thought Police will imprison anyone with a thought more than 140 characters long. NO THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN YOU STUPID STUPID FUCK JESUS. LOGIC FAIL. I HATE YOU.

Anyway, this is interesting, because I've been, like, Jawbreaker sucking on this idea that Twitter lets you see what "everyone" is thinking about music. Because before Twitter, it was difficult to find out what lots of people were saying about a given artist/album/performance (particularly a performance) -- any time a large group of people congregated to talk about an artist/album/performance, it was a self-selecting community: fans, haters, writers/commenters at Pitchfork, writers/commenters at Poptimists.

Twitter is not a self-selecting community, at least not in terms of musical taste (and as it grows, it ceases to be self-selecting in any terms) -- so when I go to http://search.twitter.com and type in, say, "demi lovato," I don't see what fans are saying about Demi Lovato, or what haters are saying about Demi Lovato, or what indie or pop fans are saying about Demi Lovato. I see what "everyone" is saying about Demi Lovato.

Twitter can also function as a de facto message board / community for artists who aren't popular enough to have an actual message board / community, thanks to that search feature -- and in that way, it actually works against cumulative advantage. Because cumulative advantage really only works if an artist's visibility is directly proportional to its popularity, and if people have no way of making a less popular artist more visible (to themselves). You may see more mentions of a more popular artist on your Twitter, but you can still seek out mentions of a less popular artist -- and when you do, you can respond to those mentions, and others can respond to your responses, and soon there may be as many mentions of the less popular artist as there were of the more popular artist.

And, okay, in trying to take this argument to its logical conclusion, I realize I have a problem with this: The flow of information is critical to democracy, since it's critical that diverse ideas be heard; but also, owing to cumulative advantage, the flow of information cuts down on diversity.

This only works if we assume that no new ideas will ever enter the system -- that this is Information Idol, and we will stop talking about other ideas one by one, until the final idea is crowned the winner.

[koganbot]

What I wrote was condensed, so: Cumulative advantage says that people tend to cluster more than they disperse, but obviously there are also reasons to disperse or we'd all be living in Africa, sharing the same apartment, and speaking the same language. Cumulative advantage is never the only factor in play unless everything else is exactly equal, which it rarely is. But what the idea of cumulative advantage tells us is that if you have information about how others are acting (e.g., in the experiment Watts et al. conducted, the knowledge was of whether or not others were downloading a particular song) this will change everyone's behavior, and the change will be that people will be more likely to pay attention to what others are paying attention to and more likely to ignore what others are ignoring - which, again, doesn't mean that there aren't counter tendencies. Here's Watts et al.'s writeup of their experiment and conclusions for Science, if you have time to take a look (Science will make you register and then they'll be emailing you their table of contents once a week) and here's his short piece on the subject in the NY Times.

But anyway, what I meant above with my hypothesis is that if you get more people's opinions and have knowledge of what more people are listening to, this creates greater diversity for you, inspiring you to hear a larger amount of music and giving you a greater knowledge of what's there. But also, it makes it more likely that you and people hitherto unknown to you will come to listen to similar things and adopt similar attitudes and opinions (not that you will listen to entirely similar things and share all attitudes, just more than if you hadn't come in contact). This seems logical anyway, but Watts' experiment suggests that this will be magnified beyond the inherent appeal of the music and the attitudes, and also that chance will play a role in which music and attitudes get listened to/adopted by a lot of people (because early random differences in attention get locked in by cumulative advantage; but again, this doesn't mean that the appeal of the music and of the ideas plays no role, just that chance also plays a role).

So what I'm hypothesizing is that, with greater information flow, you, and I, and any individual will experience greater diversity, but that the diversity of the world overall will decrease, as it becomes less likely that different groups and subgroups of people will remain isolated from one another. So, e.g., I'm more likely now than a similar Euro-American one hundred years ago to know something about the attitudes and culture of a Chinese grandmother who just steps off the boat for her first visit to America (more diversity for me), but the grandmother and I are more likely to share ideas and attitudes than the equivalent Chinese grandmother and Euro-American a hundred years ago (less diversity for the world).

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Also, from the Bowers article:

The "status" update that was the lamest and most indulgent element of MySpace is the most abused feature of Facebook, and such mundane-to-desperate broadcasts are almost Twitter's entire raison d'etre.

Er, is this even correct, historically speaking? I seem to recall the MySpace status update being implemented as a reaction to Facebook stealing MySpace's thunder; it was regarded as lame and indulgent precisely because it was implemented as a reaction to Facebook stealing MySpace's thunder. I guess he isn't explicitly saying that MySpace had a lame thing, and Facebook made that lame thing important, and Twitter made that lame thing everything, but that seems to be what he's implying. (He also neglects to mention that much of the abuse of the Facebook status update is a consequence of Twitter -- people now ship their tweets to their Facebook status, so that their Facebook status gets updated nine billion times each day, with shit you already read as a follower of their Twitter -- and that the Facebook status [and Facebook itself] has now become lame in the same way that the MySpace status [and MySpace itself] was lame: changes have been implemented as a result of Twitter stealing Facebook's thunder. That was a very long sentence. I'm sorry.)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

See, on Twitter you would have had to find a way to fit that simple concept into 140 characters. This has been the biggest benefit of Twitter for me. But you already knew that if you read my Tumblr. (Sigh, why can't some of these things just cease to exist so I could have like ONE THING again!!!!!)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I know. I have TOO MUCH INTERNET.