Aaron Swartz - The Network Transformation

The change in the architecture of the media is completely connected to a change of the control With the broadcast system you have one person in one station deciding what gets put out over the airwaves. When you have distributed network like the internet everybody can be a server.
There's no distinction between the broadcaster and the receiver: every computer does both.
You can take your home laptop and run a server off of it that can distribute movies and music and webpages and email in the same way that the biggest computers at google can.
there's no fundamental difference between the computers they have in iraq in their server rooms and what you have on your desk In the old system of broadcasting, you were fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves  you could only send out 10 channels  over the airwaves in television or even with cable you had 500 channels.
On the internet, everybody can have a channel; everyone can get a blog or a MySpace page; everyone has a way of expressing themselves and so what you see now is not a question of who gets access to the airwaves, it's a question of who gets control  over the ways you find people.
You start seeing power centralising in sites like google,  these sort of 'gatekeepers' that tell you where on the internet you want to go the people who provide you your sources of news and information.
so its not only certain people have a license to speak now everyone has a license to speak,  it's question of who gets heard.
So one of the biggest questions we're facing in a world of many speakers how do you find what's good?  Are we gonna go to a system like the old media where you go to CNN and they pick a handful of people to focus on and you read what they say or are we going to go with something more like the internet  where everybody has a chance of being heard, a more democratic system. One of the most interesting technologies for doing something like that is a system called collaborative filtering, where everybody expresses their opinions on what they like and what they don't like and the computer tries to match you up with other people who have similar preferences and recommend you things that they also like that you didn't know about before.
It's the same kind of system you see on Amazon where people who bought this book also bought this book people are trying to experiment that not only with books but with blogs, web pages and news stories all across the internet, they're trying to find ways and things that you've never heard of before and bringing them in front of you  Mass media had this fundamental paradox because it was aiming at a huge audience but it wanted to convince everybody they were an individual you see all these ads on television all the time like 'buck the trend, buy these jeans' right!? and it's on a show that 4 million people are watching, you're not going to buck a trend by doing what 4 million other people are.  Now that the internet is actually making these nitch things possible the mass media is incredibly threatened  no longer this idea of bucking the crowd and being your own it's no longer just a theory you can actually do it on the internet And what we're starting to see is tools that take power away from the big conglomerates and start to distribute it to small groups.
And so there are a bunch of issues in a system like that there are questions of funding you know, how will these small groups get paid and how will the random blogger be able to live in a way that an investigative journalist can now because there's one giant source of advertising you know there are question finding people, how will I be able to find the stuff I'm interested, and the stuff that's trustworthy and reliable and so for each of these there are new technologies  people are trying all kinds of different things and all of these say different things about the internet  there is still experimentation in this, since everybody can just go up and start a website with a new piece of technology that try and solve one of these problems We're seeing lots of different possibilities, lots of different funding models lots of different recommendations systems and who knows what will work best we have a chance to try it all and see what falls out So there are a couple of interesting funding models: One of course is this standard model of advertising, you go to a bunch of big corporate sponsors and instead of having them fund a television show you have them fund your webpage but a more interesting one is you do the same thing with nitch groups instead of going to IBM/Ford or a big company, and having them buy a banner on your website you go to people that actually care about the readers you have if you're a design weblog you go to design companies if you're a political blog, you go to other politicians you have a very targeted narrow group of people who are really interested in the subject, thats an audience advertisers really love another possibility is to turn directly to your readers for support you see blogs say, I wanna go to a trip to New Hampshire to cover the american political conventions will you support me? and the readers pour in money these people are very dedicated they feel like they have a personal connection  with the person writing they are eager to spend money to support it! Another thing is that you simply work of volunteer labor you have people that have a day job thats an expert in a subject and they just enjoy talking about it so they rate stuff in their free time and publish it on the internet or they have readers who read their site and contribute stuff and it gets compiled into one exciting source.
So I think there are lots of interesting experiments, people are trying lots of different ways One of the errors you had with television, right, could only provide one level of interest it was funded based on adertising not on how much people cared about the programme advertisers were going to pay the same no matter how exciting or how compelling or how interested an audience was in a show so what you ended up with was fairly boring shows that appealed to lots of people because that's what advertisers wanted they wanted lots people watching the shows whereas in a normal market economy what happens is if you really want something you pay more for it you just can't do that with television. So one of the interesting things about broadcast is that a lot of what you like depends on what other people like there are only so many shows out there they are all kind of bland so what happens, you have these megahits like American Idol or lost, where everybody at the water cooler is talking about this show, so you have to watch it because otherwise you can't keep up with them whatever social factors get involved you have this sort of process of rich gets richer one thing takes off because thats what everybody else is doing! One nice thing about the internet is that it allows for so much more variety that nitch products can get so much more attention and interest So they've the run the numbers and this this proven mathematical fact that as long as some percentage of what you care about is whether other people like it or now you're gonna end up with this patterns of hits and failures if you have two things which are equivalent in quality, one of them is liked by one more person than the other one, you're going to go that one there's some small chance that you're going to go to that one and everybody's going to start going to that one and all of a sudden you have harry potter this one book plucked of nowhere that suddenly becomes this massive mega-hit.
not because it's a hundred million times better written than every other book but simply because everybody's reading it and putting stuff on the internet doesn't change that, you still care about what your friends like, still wanna read what everybody else is talking about, ou still wanna do what's popular because you think maybe other people have a valid opinion and maybe you wanna talk to them about it maybe you want to join part of this community but whatever your reason is, as long as you care about what other people opinion you're going to end up with these hits. You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about everybody's watching American Idol doesn't matter how good the show is I mean it has to be somewhat decent so people watch it, but once everybody's watching it, talking about it, you know, it suddenly becomes this megahit for no real reason, right, just because it's a social phenomenon and what television does, it chops off the tale and it throws away all the other shows people would like but don't care enough about to be megahits and instead pours all of its money into these cheap produced shows  well you can't get rid of hits, right it's a fact that people would wanna do what their friends are doing you can't avoid that but what you can do is say there's the whole rest of the world out there there's a whole rest of what people care about other than what everybody else is doing Everybody has their own particular interests everybody has something that fascinates them and what the internet does is it allows them to 'do' that to get involved and find other people who share these things one of the exciting things about Wickipedia is that it doesn't just have articles on you know, 100 most popular things or 1000 most popular things you can pick the most obscure subject in the world and there's an article about it Because for EVERYTHING, there's someone who cares a great deal about it and that's what television, that's what radio doesn't provide, but the internet does! it provides a way for you to get in touch with those other people who really  care about this completely obscure thing It doesn't just go into the direction of topic, it goes into the direction of time You can go back in time and find all the shows that have been canceled find all the articles that have been deleted you can go back and find everything that has been lost in major culture and it's got a place on the internet Youtube music videos from the 70s and the 80s that you can't find anywhere these days you can watch at your leisure I think lessening the power of the hits bringing down the things from the top and making it more egalitarian is the something we should always strive for it may be really difficult it may not be super possible but it's something to hope for, to drive for and what that means is throwing away as much as possible all the things that give you hints about you should do this because other people like it it's very tempting when you're building a website or programming system is to start sorting things that are really popular at the top but all that does is, that it makes it less democratic and less fair you have to have continual pressure, to try and pull things from the bottom from the tale up give everybody a chance to look at everything and if you do that maybe, you won't get completely rid of hits, but you can start to ???? some of their problems I mean that's one power of data mining is that construct to find obscure subjects that you wouldn't have found simply because they are not popular you know one of the tools of recommendation can be to pull you to the less popular stuff on the tale The random article button on Wikipedia is really cool in this sense you can just wake up every day and read about some completely random topic that you never heard of except for the fact that there's an article on the Wikipedia about it and boy are there some completely random topics on Wikipepdia