purple motes

"Once upon a time, the editorial page of the New York Times set the political agenda for the U.S.," began the old man. That sounds like a highly undemocratic fairy tale in this Age of Digg (AD). Today, Google is offering Australian Federal Election tools, Youtube is running You Choose '08, Yahoo is mashing up its own efforts, and the political clout of dailyKos appears to be rapidly approaching that of AARP. A significant share of persons appear to be highly interested in discussing politics with other like-minded persons. They now have much greater capability to do that.

The rise of civilizations in ancient China illustrates the importance of communication. The development of enduring social stratification among lineages living in the same location, the organization of lineages into geographical units and large warrior groups, and the development of writing all emerged in ancient China by the Longshan period 5000 to 4000 years ago. Rather than being a result of developments in productive technology and trade, these developments seem to have been products of the emergence of socially recognized, highly valued communications capabilities.[1]

Kings in ancient China emerged as those persons with special capabilities for communicating with ancestors and spirits. Kings had the right family connections and reputations for merit. More importantly, however, they performed rituals offerings, read oracle bones, and possessed elaborately designed bronze tripods (dings, also transcribed as tings). Dings were expensive and scarce. They embodied animals that, used skillfully, were apparently powerful means for communicating with ancestors and spirits.[2] Persons who sought effective communication with ancestors and spirits had to serve the king.

New findings hint that exclusive communication capabilities may also have been important in the rise of cities in northern Mesopotamia. Tell Brak in northeastern Syria, which eventually became the ancient city of Nagar, developed as a city from about 6200 years ago. A high-density central region developed, but so did "clusters of occupied space interspersed with vacant zones." The total settlement area was nearly twenty times larger than other settlement areas of the time.[3]

Subsequent development expanded outer settlements inward. The researchers who documented these developments observed:

The spatial separation between settlement clusters suggests social distance between discrete subcommunities. ... At Brak, clustering may have resulted from maintenance of social distance by immigrant groups. Existing social mechanisms may not have been able to sustain increased density in a nucleated form.

The researchers suggest that urbanism at Brak was "at least in part the unintended result of the actions of autonomous and nonhierarchically ranked groups."[4]

Tell Brak clearly was a center of trade and industry. The central mound included large industrial structures. One building in the central mound contained "grinding stones, big ovens, basalt pounders, carefully crafted stone and bone tools, flint and obsidian blades, mother-of-pearl inlay, and clay spindle whorls." A structure from about a century later contained piles of obisidian imported from Anatolia, as well as imported jasper, marble, serpentine, and diorite stones.[5]

But Tell Brak was more than just a center of trade and industry. Archaeologists found a "unique stone chalice": "a chalice with a white marble base and black obsidian bowel held together at its seam with bitumen."[6] An excavation in 1937-38 uncovered what's called the "Eye Temple":

The temple, built ca 3500–3300 BCE, was named for the hundreds of small alabaster "eye idol" figurines, which were incorporated into the mortar with which the mudbrick temple was constructed. The building's surfaces were richly decorated with clay cones, copper panels and gold work, in a style comparable to contemporary temples of Sumer. [Wikipedia]

Tell Brak became a highly stratified ritual center in addition to being a center of trade and industry. While the Eye Temple is dated much later than the growth of the city, it may have had significant but yet undiscovered antecedents.

Like the development of civilization in ancient China, the development of Tell Brak may have depended on widespread interest in gaining access to scarce communication capabilities (persons and technologies). Small groups might hear accounts that a person or persons at Tell Brak could communicate with spirits whom members of the small group themselves could not contact. They might go to Tell Brak to investigate, settling close enough for observation and investigation, but not so close as to create friction in ordinary communication with the strangers living there.

The combination of shared interests and new communications capabilities seems to have reshaped cities and civilizations. Discussing politics using web-based communications technologies can have a large effect on political authority.

Notes:

[1], Chang, Kwang-Chih (1989) "Ancient China and its anthropological significance," pp. 155-66 in C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ed., Archaeological thought in America Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2] Chang, Kwang-Chih (1983) Art, myth, and ritual: the path to political authority in ancient China. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[3] Ur, Jason A., Philip Karsgaard, and Joan Oates (2007) "Early Urban Development in the Near East," Science v. 317 (31 Aug) p. 1188.

[4] Id.

[5] Lawler, Andrew (2007) "Murder in Mesopotamia?" Science v. 317 (31 Aug) p. 1165.

[6] Id.

1 Comment

I saw on a woman's car a bumper sticker that said: "Porn! / It's cheaper than dating!"

As a serious Ph.D. economist, I believe in price elasticity and substitution effects. I also realize that pornography has been the most successful type of paid content on the Internet. But something is missing in that economic analysis. I couldn't put my hand around it.

Then I remembered in the DC metro an advertising poster. The right half of the poster had a big picture of half the face of a smiling woman. The left side of the poster in big letters declared: "Abortion is a reflection that we have not met the needs of women."

Pornography is a poor substitute for a real, live, human person. Men deserve better than pornography. Pornography is a reflection that we have not met the needs of men.

4 Comments

Most television watching is best modeled as a two-stage decision process. First, a person decides to watch television. That means the person sits on a couch and stares vacantly at a large screen a few yards away. Then the person decides what to watch. That means choosing among current, salient video programming offerings. These two decisions are very loosely connected.

The behavior of persons who own a digital video recorder (DVR) is consistent with this decision model. In the U.S., households with a DVR use it for at most 25% of their television viewing time.[1] In the UK, households with a DVR use it even less -- about 14% of television viewing time.[2] Most of the time, persons can't be bothered to record and watch programs pre-selected from the huge universe of programs available to be recorded.

Persons don't even bother to record programs so that they can skip advertising. When UK DVR owners were asked about how they use their DVR, 40% reported regularly fast-forwarding through adverts, while 42% reported never fast-forwarding through adverts. When specifically asked, 78% claimed to always or almost always fast-forward through adverts when using the DVR.[3] Evidently persons can't remember well their immediate viewing behavior with respect to adverts. More significantly, persons who aren't using their DVR surely aren't fast-forwarding through adverts.

Average time spent watching television is likely to change neither quickly nor by a large amount in response to changes in the relative value of media use opportunities. Differences in video programming have little effect on aggregate television viewing time. New services offered on computer screens and mobile screens --- video sharing, social networking, community news and information, in-depth learning opportunities -- are similarly likely to have little effect on aggregate television view time. The amount of leisure time available (total working hours, weekday versus weekend) and socio-economic characteristics affecting broad patterns of life -- educational attainment, employment status, presence of children at home -- largely control television viewing time.

A recent IBM-sponsored survey has media pundits discussing the decline or explosion of television, but the survey actually provides rather weak evidence. The survey was an Internet-based survey, not a random sample of some relevant universe. Persons who respond to an Internet-based survey are likely to use the Internet more than average adults. U.S. respondents to the survey were 71% women and 27% persons ages 18-24, while U.S. adults (persons 18 and over) are 51% women and 13% ages 18-24.[4] Thus the survey demographics highly over-represent women and young adults.

Most significantly, persons who have commented on the results of the survey generally don't seem to understand what was reported. The press release for the survey reported that "personal Internet time rivals TV time." In the survey, "personal Internet time" meant Internet use at home and on "personal time at work."[5] A survey in 2002 of a representative sample of U.S. adults found that employees with web access spent 3.7 hours per week in personal use of the Internet at work, and 5.9 hours per week using the Internet for work-related purposes at home. Both these time uses apparently count as "personal Internet use" in the IBM survey. Television isn't a feasible alternative for either of those time uses. Most workers in the cushy private sector don't have televisions in their offices, and watching television is almost never a work-related activity at home.

The challenge for traditional television isn't that television viewing time will decline rapidly. The challenge is that traditional television advertising, compared to personalized, action-oriented, performance-measurable advertising, will decline rapidly in market value.

Notes:

[1] Reporting on a telephone survey, June-July 2007, of a random sample of 1,800 adults in households with a TV (and a telephone), Leichtman Research Group stated that "over one in every five households" had a DVR and estimated that "95% of all TV viewing in the U.S. is still of live TV." These data imply that no less than 75% of DVR owners' TV viewing time is live viewing, i.e. distributor-scheduled programming. The extent to which persons record and watch television programs on analog videocassette recorders raises the estimated DVR owners' live TV viewing time. So does the extent to which DVR ownership is over 20%. An IBM-sponsored Internet survey found 24% of persons in the U.S. owned a DVR in April, 2007. See U.S. findings, p. 9. As discussed subsequently above, this sample isn't representative of the U.S. adult population.

[2] Spring, 2006 BARB measurements in households with Sky+ DVR.

[3] Ofcom, The Communications Market 2007, Section 1 Converging communications markets, p. 85. In Q1 2007, 15% of UK homes had DVRs, almost double the 2006 figure. See id. p. 69.

[4] See U.S. study findings, p. 4, compared to U.S. census data.

[5] U.S. study findings, p. 7, comparing "Daily Personal Internet Usage; Home and Personal Time at Work" to "Daily Television Viewing."

3 Comments

There is no Chief Executive Officer neuron in a brain. In brains, the most general decision-making processes (top of the executive hierarchy) and the broadest and most abstract representations (top of the perceptual hierarchy) are physically instantiated in the broadest networks of neurons. That's rather different from the structure of a company in which the Chief Executive Officer is considered to be the highest decision-maker and the best representative of the company.

Joaquín Fuster, a leading neuroscientist, described this contrast:

The cortical structure and dynamics of the executive hierarchy, like those of the perceptual hierarchy, differ radically from the structure of social hierarchies. In social hierarchies, such as those of industrial and military organizations, representation -- like power -- is concentrated at the top; in cortical hierarchies, it is distributed at the top. Because both perceptual and executive hierarchies are formed largely by divergent connections, representations at the top are much more broadly based, in neural terms, than those at the bottom....[1]

The Neurocritic provides conceptual and anatomical diagrams from one of Fuster's earlier papers.

Note that this difference involves neither an absence of hierarchy nor a contrast between bottom-up and top-down control. The brain's executive and perceptual hierarchies are built upon anatomical gradients of memory formation:

Because the three gradients of memory formation -- phylogeny, ontogeny, and connectivity -- largely coincide temporally and spatially, we can trace them by focusing on any one of them, such as the ontogenetic gradient, as portrayed by the myelogenetic map of the cortex. The numeration of the map refers to the order of myelination of the various cortical areas in perinatal periods.[2]

Moreover, both top-down and bottom-up control are important aspects of brain functioning, each with somewhat different communications technologies.

The Internet is like a global brain. That global brain, like the one in your head, includes hierarchies and forms of top-down control. At the same time, the most general decisions about the goals of the Internet are a product of the relations of many active participants. Relations among persons, not one corporate person, represents what the Internet is.

Notes:

[1] Joaquín Fuster (2006), "The cognit: A network model of cortical representation," International Journal of Psychophysiology 60, p. 130.

[2] Id. p. 127, reference to figure omitted.

2 Comments