Politics and Network Effects

The Positive Value of Network Effects

General / Framing points

• What's our baseline?
  • We have a perception of social apathy, etc, that we're setting this all up against.
  • But that's US-centric - how big is our context here?
• Technological determinism
  • Are we talking about whether the technology can vs cannot do something, or are we discussing our uses of it?

Benkler's Claim

"The basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use opens up a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies -- individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice." - Benkler, Wealth of Networks, pp. 7-8

Distinct but overlapping points:

• "Individual Freedom"
  • Ability to self-broadcast
  • Trust networks - social interpretation of the news w/ peers.
    • But see Sunstein's "Daily Me"
  • Counter-argument: is the technology really a significant enough force to bring about change in this area?
  • Counter-argument: if there are still secret police who will show up when you post something critical on your blog, how is your freedom increased?
    • But, the arms race: a fixed number of censors can't read an exponentially increasing number of blogs.
    • Also, the internet crosses borders. It's harder to filter a blog hosted elsewhere than to shut down a printing press in country.
• "Genuine Participation" -
  • Timeliness: immediate response of bloggers, YouTubers to media comments.
    • Counterpoint: who really does this? Are we just taking the word of a different set of quasi-authorities?
  • Easier to reach under-served groups, e.g. the blind (far easier to re-code websites to deliver to a braille reader, than to re-print physical lit in braille). Or, bilingual households, or youth outreach.
    • Much higher youth participation in 2006 than 2002 - related to online use? Not clearly so, but possible.
    • Complication: few sites actually use, e.g., braille translation.
  • Feeling more involved might lead to higher participation, c.f. blog with no readers.
  • Distributed lobbying / political action
    • e.g. [MoveOn.org http://www.moveon.org/], but it's not quite there yet. Or is it? C.f. Ned Lamont.
    • But regardless of fundraising, new people are brought into the process.
    • Hard to show causality sometimes; war was unpopular anyway.
• "Critical Culture" - access to media, individual's ability to respond.
  • Individual fact-checking (e.g., Hillary's background)
  • Sites that explore and expose left/right divide, e.g. [Daou Report http://blogreport.salon.com/default.aspx], [left2right http://left2right.typepad.com/]
  • Institutional Pressures: as more information is available and easily searchable, pressure to be transparent.
• "Social Justice"
  • Impact of, e.g., self-broadcasting: as more voices are heard, their political influence will increase.

Some Counterarguments

Reformatting Politics 1: The Internet is Not That Free

• An underlying presumption of the Benkler approach is that the Internet is a sort of "grass roots" network.
  • In fact, ARPANET was a military project; the academics glommed on there at some point.
• Many people do participate in the Internet, but how meaningful is it?
  • who just visits a blog once and never comes back?
• P. xxi: calling the Internet a tool for democracy forecloses debate as to the real function of the technology & its impact on democracy.
  • The usual suspects are just using a new tool to do their same old work.
  • Internet is a neutral technology: it could easily be put to non-democratic ends. E.g. voter suppression, misinformation, astroturfing, news and blog filtering.

Shirky's Power-Law Argument

"Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality ", or, if no one reads your blog, did your freedom of speech really improve?

Sunstein: "Daily Me"

• downsides to "pull" news vs. "push"
  • Confirmation bias. If I already believe DailyKos (or TownHall), how much am I really learning by re-reading it daily? What am I missing by not checking elsewhere?
  • Factionalising of political sides
• Counter args:
  • filtering is not that good
  • Re-intermediation: browse the web through NYTimes, CNN