Final Text Response to What’s Mine is Yours

What’s Mine is Yours stresses the importance of peer-to-peer relations through new technologies. The authors, Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers, define Collaborative Consumption as “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space, and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again” (xv). As far as they are concerned, we are in a new utopian age where freedom of exchange defines the contemporary market. Now that people have the ability to access one another without impediment, they will utilize their resources for a greater good.

They claim, “The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services” (xiv). In other words, our new networking and technological abilities will drive away the need for a pre-existing institution to facilitate our consumption. However, a lot of their sentiments seem to have been presented without objection. We are not heading towards a utopia of individual self-interest trumping corporate greed; we are simply moving into the business of connecting buyer and seller. Even if you get rid of the institution that previously offered the service, and thereby disrupt the traditional distribution model, there will still remain a new “collaborative” institution that will take its place. You no longer need a travel agent to book your hotel room for you, because now you can reach out directly to people offering up a place to sleep on Couchsurfing.org. But the authors don’t address the fact that Couchsurfing.org still generates revenue (yes, it is a non-profit) in exchange for offering a service. Airbnb.com is probably a better example of this “new economy:” it charges 9-15% of the nightly cost to rent a space. Clearly this is a self-sustaining business with a profit model—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Funnily enough, Facebook’s status as the de facto example of a new model of peer-to-peer discourse has ultimately sparked unending speculation as the to the specific amount in billions and billions of cash revenue it earns by selling every single piece of information it can gather on its members. No one would deny that the number of companies that buy and sell personal data is growing, and the scope of the data collected is widening. Does anyone believe that Facebook is more altruistic than the next $50 billion dollar conglomerate simply because its business model encourages peer-to-peer interaction?

The Huffington Post has been widely regarded as politically-progressive, independent news blog. In the book, it is mentioned that “collaborative consumption will sit side-by-side and eventually may go head-to-head with the old consumerist model, must as blogs such as the Huffington Post now compete with hundred-plus-year-old newspapers such as the New York Times.” However, this too, is not the idealist news source it has claimed to be. What started off as a liberal blog with a small staff has grown to a worldwide publication that rivals its traditional news counterparts. Although some of their news is aggregated from other sources, they now invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek and other traditional media outlets – the same “big dogs” they were lauded for eschewing. Not only that, but it was announced a week ago that AOL was purchasing the Huffington Post for a cool $315 million. According to the New York Times, “$300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.” More proof of how much money can be made off this online community of readers with tens of millions of people.

The truth is, to offer a product widely and with a certain degree of quality control requires many hours of labor, even if the business model does not involve the sale of a physical good. Without a model for business that produces a profit, none of these collaboration websites could exist. Couchsurfing.org generated more than $1 million through fees and donations in 2009 and spent nearly all of it administering the site. It is unfathomable how much Wikipedia must expend to continue it operations (I’m assuming it’s a lot since they are always requesting donations from their users). As any space grows—physical or virtual—the cost to maintain it increases. As individuals come to rely on the space for their livelihoods, the incentive to drive revenue increases.

Many of the most popular peer-to-peer distribution models have achieved sustainable financial success and a sufficient user base only to be bought or merged with established businesses. The truth is that the egalitarian opportunities are rapidly being commodified and consolidated by traditional media elites both socially and financially. The examples abound—Google usurped YouTube, AOL bought the Huffington Post, eBay owns or holds a large stake in Paypal, Craigslist, Skype, Meetup.com, StubHub and StumbleUpon (and many others).

The Internet absolutely has the potential to give a public voice to an individual and to link together people who would have no other means of finding each other. Certainly, there are discourses that take place amongst small community are marked by a great deal of altruism and which function without requiring a strong central organization. The author’s postulations on the abilities new technologies can provide us are not all wrong. However, they are guilty of an overly optimistic tone researchers often take toward new technologies. It’s imperative to remember that the digital age is not a perfect one. Human behavior is slow to change and we cannot truly give up our self-serving nature. At the same time, we should also question whether a “greedy” business interest is always a negative prospect. Presumably the Egyptian protesters who organized via social media could have done so through other traditional social networks—revolts have succeeded prior to twitter—but the true inherent worth of the networks that were utilized, is not the method that they use to connect peer to peer, but their broad adoption across the population and their always-on status. It’s probably impossible to fully remove the element of greed, and it’s naïve to think that a particular technology can do it alone. But keeping the lights turned on at Facebook keeps a lot of other people happily poking away.

Resources:

Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Print.

Peters, Jeremy, and Vern Kopytoff. "Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post." New York Times. 7 Feb. 2011. Web. .

Final Image Response for Digital Textuality

(Double click the image for larger view)

What's Mine is Yours Response - Digital Textuality Final Paper

Rebecca Case

Digital Textuality

Spring 2011

There is no doubt that the change in media has had its effect on culture. From the invention of the written word to today’s communication technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, the medium greatly affects how ideas and resources are shared. A common theme has emerged, that today we live with the promise of a new utopian age of the Internet; that because the technology for egalitarian access to information exists, there is equality in the access to information amongst all people. The Internet and key Internet programs have revolutionized communication and organization of the public sphere, but the truth is that the egalitarian opportunities are rapidly being commodified and consolidated by traditional media elites both socially and financially. Wealthy, white males and the financial control they have traditionally possessed still retain their power over shaping communication in the Internet age. This paper explores the connections between the utopian portrayal of new media technologies in Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ What’s Mine is Yours and Jurgen Habermas’ “Public Sphere.” Though the Botsman and Rogers’ of today will say that this moment in time marks a new era in the public sphere, it is not without its problems.

Habermas’ public sphere is a conceptual, not physical, public arena where people come outside of their private lives to discuss and debate the ideas of the day. He states, “only when the exercise of political control is effectively subordinated to the democratic demand that information be accessible to the public, does the political public sphere win an institutionalized influence over the government through the instrument of law-making bodies” (73). The public sphere is key in understanding the democratic age we live in here in America. At it’s best, it affords people the opportunity to connect to political authority and government and act as a place where the needs of the people can be discussed and made known. In the age before the Internet, this was commonly represented by people protesting in the streets, attending a public lecture series, or a town hall meeting. Habermas claims that the public sphere is a not a result of natural evolution, but is historical. The public sphere came to be out of bourgeois culture, where for the first time in history, the private individual came to discuss publicly the issues of the day, but not in political arena. This is unlike the old idea of feudal power, where the head is sovereign and represents power. In a democracy, people become caretakers of power and the ruling class evolves to serve the public. Habermas characterizes modern constitutions as “the catalogues of fundamental rights [that] were the perfect image of the liberal model of the public sphere” (76). They gave society a guarantee of private autonomy and restricted the public authority.

Doubtful, few will argue that the Habermasean ideal of the public sphere resembles the public discourses of the 20^th century. Marked by media conglomerates, the pursuit of ratings and a one way method of cultural distribution, the private individual has had very little say in the shaping of his society, unless he was a wealthy, educated white male; outside of this elite class exists few exceptions. Can the Age of the Internet rescue the ideals of Habermas’ public sphere? What’s Mine Is Yours claims that modern social tools, made possible through the advent of the Internet, remove obstacles to public collaboration. Botsman and Rogers attest collaborative consumption is “traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, redefined through technology and peer communities. Collaborative Consumption is enabling people to realize the enormous benefits of access to products and services over ownership, and at the same time save money, space, and time; make new friends; and become active citizens once again” (xv). There are sites such as Freecycle, Couchsurfing and Zipcar make the sharing of resources possible for anyone with an Internet connection. Flickr makes the publication of pictures possible and, on MySpace and Facebook, one can do the same with both text and music. Putting ones possessions thoughts, or work in a public arena is no longer bottlenecked by conventional publication and marketing.

This power of the amateur to connect with one another in new ways can ignite social change. What’s Mine Is Yours cites the example of the “Let’s do It” grassroots campaign. In 2008, Rainer Nolvak, Tiina Urm and Ahti Heinla, masterminded a national clean-up day in Estonia. These three people were able to get “720 volunteers to scour the country and photograph sites using mobile phones to pinpoint more than 10,500 locations where rubbish had been illegally dumped” (53). Fifty thousand people joined forces to clean up illegal dump-sites. They were able to use the resources of today break into public consciousness without the barrier of traditional press. Everyone now has the ability to access the public and make a difference. This is why Botsman and Rogers see these contemporary Internet tools as a venue for anyone to have access to the utopian public sphere.

However, the true, modern public sphere is not utopian or free from outside influence. Habermas notes this happening as early as with the growing influence of newspapers. He notes how the editorial staff of a newspaper has the power to wield public opinion. The slant individual newspapers take on the issues becomes intrinsically linked to the view the public takes on those same issues. “The publishers insured the newspapers a commercial basis, yet without commercializing them as such. The press remained an institution of the public sphere itself, effective in the manner of a mediator and intensifier of public discussion, no longer a mere organ for spreading of news but not the medium of a consumer culture” (76). As commercialization increases, the public sphere becomes more about growth in capital and less about making the needs of the people known.

Today, with mass media and the Internet, instead of seeing an improvement in open and fair communication, there is, in fact, a greater manipulation of the public sphere. The clamor for ratings has become a clamor for “hits.” The public sphere becomes dominated by advertising and instead of fostering discourse; the news has become a perpetual sales pitch and an echo chamber of sensationalism. The idea that the Internet provides a kind of digital utopia where we are all informed and our voices are equally heard is theoretically true. But the truth is the Internet is often only a dangerous evolution of traditional media outlets. There is a huge difference in being involved politically and being involved with new technologies. Habermas’ public sphere is based on reciprocity and face-to-face communication. Despite growth in Internet, we’ve seen decline in public sphere and rational public discourse. In addition, we see an increase in commoditization, more external influence from market into public sphere and more ability to inform decisions. Freedom via the Internet is a fictional notion and it is a dangerous one because it encourages the illusion of true egalitarianism. The elites still maintain power and we can actually see this in What’s Mine is Yours.

Botsman and Rogers open with the story of Airbnb.com. Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharcyzk and Brian Chesky started Airbnb in 2008 with the intention of renting out an extra room in their San Francisco apartment during an annual design conference. It was later developed into a larger version of that, allowing many people to list their extra property for rent. The site quickly grew as more and more people became attracted to the notion of reasonably priced accommodations with a local flair. This story is meant to show the goodness exhibited by the people that use the site, simply wanting to meet new people and earn a few bucks from an otherwise dormant investment and clearly, Botsman and Rogers lead with this story to point out the significance of the collaboration in the Internet Age.

The story shows the changing climate of today’s communicative realm, but it also shows that there is still a power bias in our “utopian age”. First of all, these three men have to be well-off enough that they could afford to take the time necessary to put this site together, not to mention, they are doing it to rent out a room in their over-sized loft in one of most expensive real estate areas of the country. Consider the most significant barrier to entry with this service. One needs to own a property that is desirable to strangers and large enough that the owner doesn’t need use of all of it. Additionally, and possibly most important, one must note the education level required to take on such a task. It is mentioned they are graduates of the incredibly prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. Blecharczyk, the web developer, needed considerable prior knowledge of Internet tools, both how they work and how to best utilize them. Someone with little exposure to the Internet would not be able to do this. They also needed necessary capital to buy all the technological instruments needed to own and maintain a website, such as a personal computer and the cost to own a URL. Also, it is certainly the case that an individual able to own a personal computer, and therefore spend the most time using one and learning what one can do with it, would be better able to fully utilize its tools. Although they claim to operate for the “everyman”, they are, in fact, only catering to an elite group – those who have the resources to afford travel. No matter which mode of transportation one employs, getting from one place to another is very costly in today’s economic climate. Perhaps, most importantly, is that motivation for the site. Airbnb take a 3% cut of all transactions; this site would not exist if it was not yielding the owners a profit.

When we look at the history of groups and social development, the activities that hold the most importance are group activities. We have to look at social groups to understand history. Karl Marx thought we could understand history by looking at the way we manufacture our ways of existing. Jurgen Habermas felt we could understand it by how we share information. But Botsman and Rogers says the way to understand it is by the way we form groups and collaborate with one another. This moment is so crucial because the way we create groups has radically changed. New media technology offers unprecedented opportunities to share and discuss with millions of individuals but it is disproportionately utilized by the cultural “haves”. The cold truth is every new technology championed as an outlet for the "have-nots" is quickly appropriated by the traditional media outlets and those with a financial interest in their success. Many of the most popular peer-to-peer distribution models have achieved sustainable financial success and a sufficient user base only to be bought or merged with established businesses. The examples abound—Google usurped YouTube, AOL bought the Huffington Post, eBay owns or holds a large stake in Paypal, Craigslist, Skype, Meetup.com, StubHub and StumbleUpon (and many others). The Internet and key Internet programs have revolutionized communication and organization of the public sphere, but the truth is that the egalitarian public sphere Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers describe is an illusion.

Work Cited

Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Business, 2010. Print.

Habermas, Jurgen. "The Public Sphere: an Encyclopedia Article." Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 1989. 136-42. Print.

Peer-to-Peer-to-Profit

What’s Mine is Yours stresses the new importance of peer-to-peer relations. They claim, “The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services.” In other words, our new networking and technological abilities will drive away the need for a pre-existing institution to facilitate our consumption. However, a lot of their sentiments seem to have been presented without objection. We are not heading towards a utopia of individual self-interest trumping corporate greed; we are simply moving into the business of connecting buyer and seller. Even if you get rid of the institution that previously offered the service, and thereby disrupt the traditional distribution model, there will still remain a new “collaborative” institution that will take its place. You no longer need a travel agent to book your hotel room for you, because now you reach out directly to people offering up a spare room on Couchsurfing.org. But the authors don’t address the fact that Couchsurfing.org still generates revenue (yes, it is a non-profit) in exchange for offering a service. Airbnb.com is probably a better example of this “new economy:” it charges 9-15% of the nightly cost. Clearly this is a self-sustaining business with a profit model—otherwise it wouldn’t exist.

Funny enough, Facebook’s status as the de facto example of a new model of peer-to-peer discourse has ultimately sparked unending speculation as the to the specific amount in billions and billions of cash revenue it earns by selling every single piece of information it can gather on its members. No one would deny that the number of companies that buy and sell personal data is growing, and the scope of the data collected is widening. Does anyone believe that Facebook is more altruistic than the next $50 billion dollar conglomerate simply because its business model encourages peer-to-peer interaction?

The Huffington Post has been widely regarded as politically-progressive, independent news blog. It is mentioned in the book that “collaborative consumption will sit side-by-side and eventually may go head-to-head with the old consumerist model, mush as blogs such as the Huffington Post now compete with hundred-plus-year-old newspapers such as the New York Times.” However, this too, is not the idealist news source it has claimed to be. What started off as a liberal blog with a small staff has grown. Although some of their news is aggregated from other sources, they now invest more in original reporting and writing, hiring experienced journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek and other traditional media outlets – the same “big dogs” they were lauded for eschewing. Not only that, but it was announced a week ago that AOL was purchasing the Huffington Post for a cool $315 million. According to the New York Times, “$300 million of it in cash and the rest in stock. It will be the company’s largest acquisition since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.” More proof of how much money can be made off this online community of readers with tens of millions of people.

The truth is, to offer a product widely and with a certain degree of quality control requires many hours of labor, even if it is just running Couchsurfing.org and the business model does not involve the sale of a physical good. Couchsurfing.org generated more than $1 million through fees and donations in 2009 and spent nearly all of it administering the site. How much does Wikipedia now expend to continue operations? As any space grows—physical or virtual—the cost to maintain it increases. As individuals come to rely on the space for their livelihoods, the incentive to drive revenue increases.

Many of the most popular peer-to-peer distribution models have achieved sustainable financial success and a sufficient user base only to be bought or merged with established businesses. The examples abound—Google usurped YouTube, AOL bought the Huffington Post, ebay owns or holds a large stake in Paypal, Craigslist, Skype, Meetup.com, StubHub and StumbleUpon (and many others).

Maybe there are some good things that can be done through our new collaborative networks that aren’t profit-driven. In What’s Mine is Yours, the “Let’s Do It” clean-up campaign is mentioned. Through social networking sites, fifty thousand Estonians gathered to clean up their country, “an operation that otherwise would have taken the Estonian government three years and cost an estimated 22.5 million euros” to do. However, this was not merely a collaboration of people online; it required broad support from many traditional social institutions.

The Internet absolutely has the potential to give a public voice to an individual and to link together people who would have no other means of finding each other. Certainly, there are discourses that take place amongst small community are marked by a great deal of altruism and which function without requiring a strong central organization. The author’s postulations on the abilities new technologies can provide us are not all wrong. However, they are guilty of an overly optimistic tone researchers often take toward new technologies. It’s imperative to remember that the digital age is not a perfect one. Human behavior is slow to change and we cannot truly give up our self-serving nature. At the same time, we should also question whether a “greedy” business interest is always a negative prospect. Presumably the Egyptian protesters who organized via social media could have done so through other traditional social networks—revolts have succeeded prior to twitter—but the true inherent worth of the networks that were utilized, is not the method that they use to connect peer to peer, but their broad adoption across the population and their always-on status. It’s probably impossible to fully remove the element of greed, and it’s naïve to think that a particular technology can do it alone. But keeping the lights turned on at Facebook keeps a lot of other people happily poking away.

Resources:

Botsman, Rachel, and Roo Rogers. What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. New York: Harper Collins, 2010. Print.

Peters, Jeremy, and Vern Kopytoff. "Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post." New York Times. 7 Feb. 2011. Web. .

The Future of the Internet

This week’s reading was The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain.

I could not help but feel from the very beginning that his comparison between the generative Internet versus the appliancized Internet was elitist rhetoric. Zittrain assumes the vast amounts of technical skill required to program at a fundamental level and criticizes consumer-based software as a tool of authoritarian control. While I recognize Zittrain’s point—that as we abstract the software development further and further from the producer and toward the end-user it becomes increasingly less configurable—I don’t find anything in the way of a solution. That doesn’t mean Zittrain’s call to arms is without merit; it means that he is circumventing the real debate: how much control we will allow the end user—by crying foul.

Obviously the answer is not to train the citizenry in web-based coding. Short of that, what can we do? Zittrain seems more inclined to pinpoint how a compromise will not work rather than consider what sort of regulatory measures, safeguards of industry, and legal restrictions might integrate “the Internet” into our daily lives.

I am not sure what to take away from this text. I understand that the potential for abuse is rampant; that seems to be the case in any adoption of new technology. I doubt any of us today would feel comfortable using a credit card in the late 1970s or early 80s. Did we need a Zittrain then to tell us that the solution was an individual-credit-based-liability system? No. We required intervention, standardization and penalties for laws that were violated.

While Zittrain raises a lot of interesting arguments, he seems to rejoice in throwing up his hands at the problem as though he has uncovered some fundamental fissure in our society. What really are his complaints? That what was once a hobbyist’s pursuit is now the avocation of the mainstream? That interconnectivity is lost on the amateur who fails to recognize the consequences of sharing data?

Zittrain raises interesting insights but seems satisfied to remain a classifier of “the good old days.” For those willing to give Zittrain the benefit of the doubt, I would ask they turn their attention to the three page introduction titled, Solutions. Herein, Zittrain outlines the apparent dilemmas faced by contemporary networks: as the medium becomes more mainstream, the requirement for standardization and ossification increases. Zittrain describes the future of the internet as follows: “Developments then take a turn for the worse: mainstream success brings in people with no particular talent or tolerance for the nuts and bolts of the technology, and no connection with the open ethos that facilitates the sharing of improvements” (150). Perhaps I am not as elite as Zittrain but the sharing of code seems to have begun in a substantial fashion in the 2000’s with the mainstreaming of Linux; hardly a system embraced by the average user.

Perhaps the most baffling exhortation is Zittrain’s insistence that we not adopt “a strategy that blunts the worst aspects of today’s popular generative Internet and PC without killing these platforms’ openness to innovation” (150). Precisely whom does Zittrain believe is developing the PC platform; developing popular websites? The greatest condemnation I can levy against Jonathan Zittrain is that he appears to have no faith in the organic, grass-roots organism that birthed the modern PC. He is quite ready to declare the Linux OS an endangered species only because he ignores how much innovation occurs outside the Windows Intel/Mac OS spectrum. In my opinion Zittrain describes a world that was never so ideal and contrasts it with a world that is not nearly so dire.

The Exploit - A Google Search for Myself

In reading “The Exploit” by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker this week, I was prompted to look at the way the current state of the internet allows one to communicate their true selves. The book is a study of the effect of networks on communication and the internet is the network that takes a leading role in a lot of the arguments in the book. I would like to examine the effect of the internet on interpersonal relations as t relates to our interpersonal network.

“The exception is that one is either online or not. There is little room for “kind of” or “sort of” online. Network status doesn’t allow for technical ambiguity, only a selection box of discrete states” (126).

The social nuance we all take into account when meeting a new person and giving the presentation we deem appropriate cannot be provided for in online communication.

According to Carole Wade and Carol Tavris’ textbook “Psychology,” body language is an integral part of communication between persons. We use body language (different in most every culture) to judge is people are being sincere. According to “Psychology”, “When people are talking to each other, a mismatch of body languages will make a conversation fell ‘out of sync’; they may feel as confused and emotionally upset as if they had had a verbal misunderstanding. In contrast, when people’s gestures and body language are in synchrony, they feel greater rapport and emotional harmony” (415). We cannot account for the vital part of communication in an online forum, unless we are communicating via live. Streaming video, and even then, insincerity plays a major role.

“It is frustrating, ambiguity is, especially from a technical point of view. It works or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it should be debugged or replaced. To be online in a chronically ambiguous state is maddening, both for those communicating and for the service provider. The advent of broadband connectivity only exacerbates the problem, as expectations for uninterrupted uptime become more and more inflexible. One way to fix the ambiguity is to be “always on.” Even when asleep, in the bathroom, or unconscious, all official discourses of the Web demand that one is either online and accounted for, or offline and still accounted for” (126).

Of course, the rigor necessary for an accurate display of persona online in entirely unrealistic. I would be surprised if I was able to update the different venues of personal advertisement I ascribe to (such as my blog, Facebook or Twitter) more than once a week. Unless you have spent a moderate amount of time with the in-person Rebecca Case, you are unlikely to grasp any real idea of who I am. The interesting thing is, however, who’s to say the representation of myself any one person has seen is anything close to accurate?

In terms of web demand, “The Exploit,” describe it this way:

“Search engines are the best indicator of this demand. Bots run day and night, a swarm of surveillance drones, calling role in every hidden corner of the web. All are accounted for, even those who record few user hits. Even as the Web disappears, the networks still multiply (text messaging, multiplayer online games, and so on). The body becomes a medium of perpetual locatability, a roving panoply of tissues, organs, and cells orbited by personal network devices” (127).

We are to conclude that even if we are not reached through the Internet directly, there are many networks that still link us to the world. I would argue, however, that no matter the venue, there is no means of communication, even direct eye-to-eye communication that can truly relate who we really are to the other individual. One can argue that, the best way of expanding our personal network in a genuine way is through direct physical interaction.

6 Degrees

Duncan J. Watt’s “Six Degrees” describes a model of modern technology that explains how we are all connected. Like some of the other readings we have studied this semester, he offers few concrete conclusions (not unlike danah boyd). Watts attempts to research and study the nature of complex connected systems. He begins his analysis with the small world phenomenon. He describes the paradox of the small-world problem: “That two people can share a mutual friend whom each regards as ‘close,’ but still perceive each other as being ‘far away’ is a facet of social life at once commonplace and also quite mysterious.” This is one of several aspects of connectivity that he touches on, but does not provide a remedy for.

The main concept of the book is this notion of “six degrees of separation.” Watts states that this idea was first conceptualized by fraternity boys at Albright College, who were movie buffs and noticed a connection of all actors to Kevin Bacon (93). There was a system devised and people were given a Bacon number that corresponds to how closely they are linked to Kevin Bacon (hopefully, my Bacon number is a 6 plus).

Although this assertion would lead us to believe that this system of separation may only work for the world of actors, Watts claims it is true on a much larger scale. He states: “First, the science of networks has taught us that distance is deceiving. That two individuals on the opposite sides of the world, and with little in common, can be connected through a short chain of network ties – through only six degrees – is a claim about the social world has fascinated generation after generation.” Watts offers many examples of how this is true and how we are linked. He notes a power blackout on the Western Coast of the US caused by different lines of cable being connected and dependent on each other. He also talks about epidemics and how they are spread though our connected world. Watts argues that, when networks have been disrupted by either a collection of minor events or major shocks, we traditionally have tried to understand the disruption by re-creating events rather than studying the network’s structure. If he was writing today he might discuss the recent recession and how we may have better understood it by looking at the economy as a whole and the connections in that network.

However, true to form, this is not the end of the argument. Watts goes on to show the counter point to this line of thinking by pointing out: “But even if it is true that everyone can be connected to everyone else in only six degrees of separation, so what? How far is six degrees anyway? … So as far as extracting resources is concerned, or exerting influence, anything more than two degrees might as well be a thousand” (300). So, I guess when we look at networks on a micro-level, we are not as closely connected as we thought. As far as getting a job or causing influence, being a mere 6 degrees away from another person doesn’t mean anything. Watts notes the difference as being on a “first name basis” versus being on a “can I borrow your car” basis.

What I struggle to understand is, what exactly is Watt’s point? He seems to undermine each observation by the assertion that what he has described is largely meaningless, unpredictable, and novel. The world he describes is meaningless, the connections he describes are endlessly contingent. I have to ask: What is his point? It seems to me that in an effort to be excitedly pro-new media he has inadvertently reaffirmed that new media rests upon the socioeconomic foundation of good, old-fashioned capital.