Once upon a time, a popular saying displayed in engineers’ offices said: “Good, fast, cheap – pick any two”. Clay Shirky applies it to media diversity and comes up with this: What is clear, however, is a lesson from the weblog world: inequality is a natural component of media. For people arguing about an ideal … Continue reading “Pick any two”
Once upon a time, a popular saying displayed in engineers’ offices said: “Good, fast, cheap – pick any two”. Clay Shirky applies it to media diversity and comes up with this:
What is clear, however, is a lesson from the weblog world: inequality is a natural component of media. For people arguing about an ideal media landscape, the tradeoffs are clear: Diverse. Free. Equal. Pick two.
This is good example of trying to stretch a metaphor so far it becomes a force-fit. “Equal” isn’t consistent with either “Free” or “Diverse”. We aren’t built equal, we’re just assumed to be for legal purposes because any other assumption makes things too complicated and strange.
Shirky points out that blog popularity follows a power law, which annoys the “Emergent Democracy” buffs to the max, but it’s worse than that: as weblogs evolve from their birth in social relevance after Sept. 11, 2001, we’ve begun to see more group blogging, which takes power law concentrations to a new level. If one bright person is hundreds of times more interesting than your typical mediocre person, than surely a whole group of interesting people is exponentially more interesting than a dull individual. One of the many keys to Reynolds’ success is the large number of folks who send him links from around the globe at all hours; basically, Instapundit is a group blog with a strong editor.
So equality of readership certainly isn’t going to happen in the Blogosphere, and certainly never would in the mediasphere without some heavy coercion.
If you examine the social malaise at a larger level than media and tech, it’s hard to miss the fact that government attempts at legislating equality in various forms are behind a large number of them. The schools haven’t served the mentally retarded (or “the developmentally challenged” or whatever we’re calling them this week) very well, so we mainstream them and drag down the whole curve by failing to educate everybody else. We increase equality by hurting high performers.
Now most of us who aren’t retarded understand that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity are two different things, but in practice outcomes are used to measure opportunities because any other measure is too complicated. So somehow we need to purge the vocabulary of “equality” as a goal.
Regarding diversity, again there is a distinction to be made between diversity of ownership and diversity of thought. When the FCC rules forbade newspapers from owning TV stations, we tended to get fairly homogeneous opinions from newspapers and TV, and even newspaper monopolies in most cities. I think this is due to the overhead of running either a newspaper or a TV station, and the fact that high-overhead organizations can’t afford to alienate potential customers; when everybody’s reaching out to everybody, all the appeals sound the same.
But when you allow organizations to own TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers, they can probably go after specific market segments, just as niche publishers can go after small audiences due to low overhead. The concept is serving a narrow market well rather than serving a broad market poorly, and all of us high-tech people know that works.
So yeah, in the long run de-regulation will bring more diversity of opinion to media, but it won’t advance the cause of ownership diversity. But who said everybody’s entitled to his own TV station? If we had a real-time Internet, that would be possible, but we aren’t there yet, even if the FCC’s new rules are a step in the right direction.
UPDATE: Check this for some confirmation on the goal of heavy media regulationsists; can you spell “silencing conservatives?”
