This Guy Might Be On to Something...

Well, really I should say many of these guys, and girls, must be on to something.

Reading for this week focused on our changing world, ranging from the sudden availability to have wildly unpopular movies sent to your door, to becoming great friends with someone you've never met (face to face at least), to groups of people deciding to combine their efforts to do something hilarious, or tragic.

The first article, (Anderson, C. (2004). The long tail. Wired, 12(10).) discusses a recent economic trend shaping businesses today. What this theory boils down to, to quote on of my favorite bands, The Kinks, is "Give the people what they want." An idea that is as simple as it is obvious, but until recently has been economically impossible, due to spacial limitations of both distance and shelf availability.

The ability to ship to and from anywhere has brought the age of diverse products and titles to our finger tips, and with it comes great opportunity both for personal and financial growth.

This trend leads us to "trust" peer user recommendations over traditional advertising (which too often try to shove "hits" into our DVD players). This beckons an important question however, What then happens when an advertiser poses' as a peer reviewer? Is our informal network of trust violated and thus broken?

It is easier, and cheaper, for companies to market one product rather than dozens or hundreds, (this is why we see so many sequels today), and in their eyes could too much product diversity be a bad thing?

In the next article (Beniger, J. (1986). Control Revolution, Introduction (pp. 1-27). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.) the idea of a Control Revolution is proposed, an event so important, the author calls it an central part of the "Third Wave". The article discusses the shifts of control over the past few hundred years, and how it relates to technology, people, and organization.

I got the notion that the advent of technological breakthroughs changed our world (ie nationalization of consumerism, development of bureaucracies) and in turn our world changed the roll, and direction of technological breakthroughs (the personal computer, the Internet).

Said differently, the independent, home and neighborhood centered lives we used to live changed with the industrial revolution into system when in which we became more centralized, cooperative and dependent of each other to make progress and profits.

With this shift however, we moved towards higher technology, such as telephone networks, cell phones, and PDAs, which ironically allowed us to move back towards independence and self reliance. This new concept of independence, a shift towards personal independence and away from household independence is written about in detail in Rheingold, H. (2002). Shibuya epiphany (pp. 1-28). Smart mobs. NewYork: Perseus. [http://loc8ed.com/library/rheingold-2002.pdf].

Beniger reminds us that as witnesses and participants of this shift, we are obligated to ourselves and to the future to keep written records and observations, as this is dramatic change destined to change the world to come.

The creation of Bureaucracies, as mentioned above, leads us into the next article, (Ronfeldt, D. and Arquilla, J. (2001). Networks, netwars, and the fight for the future. FirstMonday, 6(10).) which deals with the conflict between the past (bureaucracies) and the future (networks).


Today is socially significant in terms of networks for two very real reasons. First, it is the anniversary of the September 11th atacks, an event always in our consciousness, especially in the wake of a new video released by OBL. Second, this is the second day of Gen. Petraeus' Iraq Report, a current example of what Ronfeldt and Arquilla "The Dark Side".

In class on Thursday, after reading Petraeus' reports, I would like to discuss the conection between the war in Iraq and the concept of Netwar described in Networks, netwars and the fight for the future.