Just some thoughts here, inspired by iSociety's lunchtime event with Cameron Marlow yesterday.
First, Cameron's best insight: The blogosphere contains three groups of people. The top 'A list bloggers', the middle ranking bloggers who want to be A list, and everyone else.
This leads to the thought, are we focussing on the wrong groups, by worrying about who's A-list, and what power they have? There'll always be celebrities, but how important is this compared with the distributed usage of blogs by many, many people writing for themselves and three friends? If we are looking at the wrong group, has anyone got any good thoughts on the deep impact of blogging to the majority of bloggers, and the world they live in? I can't remember reading a lot except friendly condescension for this group. Maybe it is time for some analysis.
This also seems to answer the perenniel question "Could the Blogosphere get too full to work?". With Cameron's trio of groups, the answer looks pretty straight forward. The A-list will always be full to the brim, because people can only remember so many celebrities. There may also be some secondary network scale problems, but they're probably not as important as people's inablity to remember names. These constraints will limit the size of the A list and middle only. The vast majority of micro bloggers, though, will keep going until all the world's sand has been converted to hard drive platters.
And finally, for Will Davies and That Demos Debate about emergent structure in organisations. Could it be that unease about the fairness of emergent networks is to do with the lack of responsibility to match the power? Because an internet node has no formal power over any other, it also has no responsibilities. But when power emerges anyway, through heavy linking, it isn't accompanied by any increase in responsibility. Is that the source of unease? Perhaps Mr Davies would be willing to answer below...
I guess the point is that there's a lack of legitimating structures. Tom Coates (for example) may be a very decent fellow, and earnestly assures us that he does his best to be factually accurate and doesn't seek traffic through being sensationalist (apparently when he slags of christianity, he gets more traffic - strange tastes some people have), but we really have no way of knowing, other than the amount of people who seem to respect him and have him on their blogroll. It is, as I quoted Richard Sennett in the Demos debate, an example of "power without authority". There is a lack of accountability or explanation of how or why the 'hot node' came to be so. Sure, it's not power conventionally understood, and there is no reason (as Tom stressed at the Cameron Marlow event) to assume that A-list bloggers are trying to change the world. But if blogging matters at all, then it matters how status and reputation gets distributed - the blogosphere is not a sham, but it struggles sometimes to prove this.
I've argued this better elsewhere...
http://www.theisociety.net/archives/000854.html#000854 on role of third parties in networks &
http://www.theisociety.net/archives/000845.html#000845
Posted by: Will Davies | October 08, 2003 at 07:08 PM