From: "Joseph M. Reagle Jr." <reagle@MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 04:47:58 +0800
To: "E. ALLEN SMITH" <blancw@microsoft.com
Subject: Re: self-ratings vs. market ratings
Message-ID: <9605121608.AA04472@rpcp.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 06:04 PM 5/10/96 EDT, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:
>From:   IN%"blancw@MICROSOFT.com"  "Blanc Weber" 10-MAY-1996 16:21:20.63
>
>>The more automated that filtering becomes, so that the viewer (be it an
>>adult or a child) requires less and less personal involvement in
>>evaluating what is appropriate (or even interesting) for themselves, the
>>more weak & piddly (ignorant & psychologically dependent) those people
>>could become, falling into the habit of having others - or an automatic
>>robocop -

        I was talking about this with one of the other students giving the
presentation on RSACi yesterday at Sloan. I was argueing how vice tends to
be associated with radicalism and how it seems to break people out of their
exclusive communities... (nevermind, it was a weird complex discussion.)

Regardless, I ran a roundtable on a topic similar to this. The problem of
information sharing agents evolving into exclusive communities over time. 
        
_______________________________________________
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 20:25:20 -0500
To: roundtable@rpcp.mit.edu
From: "Joseph M. Reagle Jr." <reagle@rpcp.mit.edu>
Subject: Roundtable 2/21: M. Van Alstyne - COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AND
  THE RISE OF AN INFORMATION ELITE

 COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AND THE RISE OF AN INFORMATION ELITE
            Do Computers Help the Rich Get Richer?
                       
                     Marshall Van Alstyne
                      (MIT Sloan School)
      
                     CAMBRIDGE ROUNDTABLE
                    Wed, Feb. 21, at 1:00 
                           E40-212

Several researchers have suggested that information resources are not
created equal and that information processing capacity is not distributed
uniformly.  In 1995, for example, only 17% of the adult population in the
US and Canada, roughly 35 million people had any form of access to
electronic services.  But what if access were universal?  If each
enterprise and individual were granted a digital portal onto a National
Information Infrastructure, would equal access to channels mean equal
access to information?

One unfortunate answer is no.  Circumstances exist under which a
telecommunications policy of universal access could lead to an increase in
the gap between the information "haves" and the "have-nots." Policy needs
to provide incentives for information sharing and not just access to
channels, otherwise results might be reversed from those originally
intended.

We present a formal theory of information sharing in groups which shows why
the information rich might get richer still, why there might be
balkanization of groups on the internet, why different objectives within a
group will motivate sharing or shut it down, and why it's not just what you
know but whom you know.  One of the advantages of the model is that there
are several explicit parameters that can be altered to illustrate different
effects of different policies.

For anyone who is interested, the first draft of the paper is available
from URL:  http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/home.html



_______________________
Regards,       Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues,
               and can moderate their desires more than their words. -Spinoza
Joseph  Reagle      http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html
reagle@mit.edu      E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65  BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E