Clay Shirky started the ball rolling recently when he wrote about Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, saying that the the more popular sites such as Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan get the largest proportion of the traffic today and the gap will probably continue to widen in the future. The best reactions I’ve seen so far are by Steven Johnson and Liz Lawley. Johnson says:
But the most interesting thing to me about Clay’s essay – and the subsequent response – is that the active participants in the power law system are having a conversation about the distribution and what it means, and whether they want their little ecosystem to look like that.
Most systems that display this kind of behavior 1) don’t have component parts with that level of self-awareness, and 2) don’t have the opportunity to change the dynamics of the system if they choose.
And Lawley quotes some of her own work on Discourse and Distortion in Computer-Mediated Communication
The idea of a reflexive nature of social life-referring to the way in which the structure of activity is created and recreated by the very activities constituting it-was put forth by Giddens (1984) in his discussions of social theory. This image has particular applicability in the context of CMC. We cannot study the effects of CMC upon the participants without at the same time studying the role of the participants in shaping and reshaping the context. Because the actors in this process are self-aware, theories developed and disseminated through the study of the medium can result in the use of that theory by the participants to further modify their communicative environment. As Giddens says, “Reflections on social processes (theories, and observations about them) continually enter into, become disentangled with and re-enter the universe of events they describe.”
I particularly liked the reference to Giddens. I cited this same example in the Fall of 2001 when I was taking a class at the University of Minnesota. I was presenting my own ideas about the whole internet phenomenon - the intersection of computer mediated communications and changing audiences, with a particular focus on how that will effect creativity.
Giddens is absolutely essential to this whole discussion because the reflexivity he talks about can be seen over time. Most of the analysis I’ve seen of the weblog world so far has focused on a single snapshot in time during which the number of connections between blogs are measured. What will happen when these measurements are made over time? Projects like Blogdex and Daypop track the conversation on blogs over time. But imagine what we can learn when we can see the dynamics of influence over time. What would we learn if we were able to analyze the growth of Instapundit over time? After that we need to transfer those same tools to individuals so I or anyone else can see how our own social universe is changing over time.
