Joi Ito has written a fascinating paper – Emergent Democracy about edemocracy, weblogs, the power law, trust and “emergence” (self-organizing systems).

It’s fascinating and I think it moves the debate along significantly but I don’t altogether agree with the optimism it expresses about the democratising power of weblogs. I also fear it bites off more than it can chew – bravely, Joi Ito tries to tackle edemocracy, privacy and copyright law in a single paper.

See below for a more in-depth initial analysis. In the spirit of the democratic weblogging phenomenon he describes, I welcome further comments.

I wrote a paper recently on a very similar theme: “Do the new digital media enable wider participation in the public sphere?“. I certainly wish I had read Joi’s paper earlier, but I hope mine still has interestingly contrasting things to say and I would be happy to email the full paper to people who are interested in reading further.

Thanks to Cory @ boingboing for the link

(scroll to “My biggest problem with the paper” if you just want the highlights)

1) The arguments about the problem of intellectual property protection and its effects are complex and deserve more than a 300 word section. Either they should be properly discussed or left aside as they distract from the main thrust of the piece.

2) On a similar note, the issue of privacy in an online age is just barely touched on – again it would be better to have put that aside for future consideration. And I have big concerns about the assertion that, “The powerful are increasingly able to threaten the weak, and this power must be countered by an increase in the protection of whistleblowers and dissidents through enabling people to manage their identities.” I agree that whistleblowers are important, and I am a strong advocate of better privacy protection in general but if people have the absolute ability/right to anonymity, this could make building digital reputations a real problem and could (and sometimes does) result in both cyberstalking and libel.

3) The section about emergence is fascinating and, I think, is the intellectual heart of the essay. In it Ito suggests that weblogs are tools for group dialogue and that through such group dialogue a new political form could emerge. As he points out, the paper was written using this process.

The key paragraph for me is where he suggests how ideas can drift up from personal musings to musings from the immediate social network to broader debate.

“Many bloggers begin their weblogs to communicate with their strong tie peers. They will mostly link to and communicate within their small group. At some point they will discover some piece of information or point of view which resonates with the next level, the social level. Their social acquaintances will pick up those entries that they find may be interesting to others in their social network. In this way, a small group focusing on a very local area can occasionally provide input that triggers a weak tie connection carrying the piece of information to the next level. If the piece of information resonates with increasingly more weblogs, the attention to the source will quickly increase, since the information will travel with a link back to the source and the source will be able to continue to participate in the conversation, since it will be aware of all of the links to the piece of information.”

Where I think he starts to go wrong is a few sentences later:

“Because of the six degrees phenomenon, it requires very few links before a globally significant item has made it to the top of the power curve.” I think there is some room for ideas to filter up from the local to the national but I am not convinced it will happen enough to challenge the power law. Ross Mayfield asserts that in groups of 150 – social networks of weak ties – the power law does not apply.

I fear that this number is still too large – that people can only treat weblogs on their own merits (instead of relying on reputation, which produces the power law) when they are produced by people they know reasonably well – that is by no more than a few dozen people.

So when you say something interesting, it may indeed be picked up by the people who check your weblog regularly anyway. But when they in turn try to pass your idea on to the people they know it will have to fight for attention with messages from other, better known weblogs and, most importantly, with messages from the mass media (which also get blogged frequently). Your chances that an original thought of yours will be “released” into the blogosphere if you are not already one of the “core” of top webloggers are slim, and the chance that an idea from the blogosphere will get widely discussed in the wider media are slimmer still…

My biggest problem with the paper

But my biggest beef with the paper comes from the way it seems to generalise from the way in which it was generated to a new political order. There are very significant technical and cultural barriers to be bridged before this could become a reality.

1) The digital divide would have to close a lot more than it has – basic Internet access is still not widely diffused (though it is more widely diffused than previously)
2) Weblogs have (or whatever replaces them) have to become more widely used. Even if we assume that a million people have weblogs of one kind or another (a million accounts have been registered with blogger, but some are undoubtedly inactive) that still leaves more than 600m who don’t. Microsoft and AOL have shown an interest in providing weblog functionality but…
3) Will the major weblog producers build interactive functionality into their “mass market” product?
4) Will those features be easy to use? Will they be marketed as a important functions or will they just be tacked on for power users? And therefore…
5) Will large numbers use weblogs in the richly interactive ways described in the paper? Using trackback and commenting on others’ weblogs? Or will they largely use them as an alternative to a conventional web page – ie as simple broadcast to small groups of friends?

Remember, Tim Berners Lee intended web browsers to be two-way communications tools not just means to construct “broadcast”-style web pages. Commercial companies dropped that functionality and nobody seems to have missed it (until now?)

I have had a website for nearly ten years and a weblog for three but I have only just got my mind around trackback, I don’t know how (or why) to update my RSS feed to 1.0 from 0.9, and I still mean to get around to understanding wikis one of these days. How long will it take before Joe Public gets to grips with these technologies the way Joi and the ‘blogerati’ have obviously done to put this paper together?

In short, I want to remind the authors that there is no necessary connection between the theoretical capabilities of the Internet and the mass adoption of those capabilities by a broad public.

That’s not to say that it’s not worth pushing towards the goal of greater Internet-mediated political inclusion. I’m all for that. I feel, however, that the market (or the open source community) are unlikely (for different reasons) to provide the kind of tools needed and that governments and NGOs need to get behind them. But that’s the subject of another discussion!icon movie gifsmovie wallpaper postermates running movie posterjuliet soundtrack romeo moviemovie stripmovie teacher slutrack torture scenes movietryouts movie Mapcash loan alabama advance paydaycash payday alabama loans advanceadvance cash payday loans americanloans for rate adjustable amortizationarizona loan approval land 100commercial loan 101 packagingloan payday canada 19 fast 13car 48 used month loan Map