This recent essay <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175829/> by Astra
Taylor, with an introduction written by Rebecca Solnit has a decidedly
feminist perspective. Given the huge asymmetry on our own (FRIAM)
demographic, I thought this article might be interesting to some here.
She asserts that: “open” in no way means “equal.” "While the Internet
may create space for many voices, it also reflects and often amplifies
real-world inequities in striking ways."
Astra makes direct reference to the power-law-distributed nature of web
*traffic* with hubs and links which alludes to the general consequences
of preferential attachment networks, and other similar systems known to
yield power-law distributions (e.g. erosion channels, etc.).
Despite my own allergic response to strong rhetoric where the "white
male" always plays the ultimate villain, I continue to be interested in
the topic of gender/racial inequality as a practical matter (I have a
wife, two daughters and a granddaughter, and my friends are as likely to
be hispanic or native american as lily white). In parallel, I am also
interested in the analysis of social networks as dynamical systems, both
in the activity registered on the network and in the formation and
evolution *of* the network.
Astra's point that the internet "reflects and amplifies" real-world
inequities was very poignant to me, and I think the core of the point.
The digital communication network adjusts various constants regarding
time, distance and cost-of-delivery in extreme ways, which in turn can
make otherwise relatively *stable* systems relatively *unstable*, or at
least out of the time-scales of the human moderators who might have been
acting as dynamic balancing elements in the system.
It is not surprising that the WWW was often referred to as the Wild Wild
Web in the early days because it did offer many of the same "freedoms"
and "hazards" as the US western "frontier" of post Civil War expansion
across the continent.
I'm not a fan of regulation for it's own sake, nor of quotas, nor
censorship, or any of the other obvious "knee jerk" responses to some of
the consequences of the inequities which I think I agree come with this
kind of open-ness, but that is not to say that I like the inequities
even if they are superficially in my favor.
I'm curious if others here have ideas, opinions or other references that
discuss this progressively both as a social phenomenon and perhaps in
the abstract as dynamic network form and function?
- Steve
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