Alice in the land of deafening noise

It is a popular belief that, approximately, in the course of the recent history of the human society, the agrarian form of organization was replaced by the industrial society, and later by the information society. A few years ago, in a theoretical introduction for a research on the use of the Internet, I examined this belief in this way: it is difficult to claim that the information society is a society that produces more information that the previous forms of social organization, although it certainly processes much more information than the previous historical forms¹.The network illusion creates an impression of entering the age of information boom: the source of ideas are our minds, not our networks and computers. The possibilities registered by the social media have always been here. Still, the human society now consumes more ideas than ever before, which is a supremely emancipating act. Where are the limits of this new consumerism? Understanding of this asymmetry in production and consuming of information, and of the fact that the latter is much more limited than the former, is crucial for the understanding of the nature and limitations of the social media.

Distribution of the reception of information in the new media, i.e. the attention attracted by individual persons or pieces of information in the public sphere on the Internet, complies with the law that was known much before the appearance of Facebook or Twitter. The Power Law for the new media, which describes the relationship between the reception of an information (the number of visitors of a website, the number of followers on Twitter, the number of readers of an article on Wikipedia) and the ranking of that information among many others, tells us that the largest share of attention dedicated to events in the public sphere on the Internet is targeted at an extremely small part of all events that can be found in it².This pattern is a consequence of the limited individual processing power that is available for processing of information: we have to choose something to concentrate on, because it is impossible to know and understand everything. On the other side, the need to make our communication meaningful further affects the distribution of attention in the social sphere: people have to watch the same things to be able to create a public discourse in which everyone would know what they are talking about. The meaning is not defined only by the content of the message, but also by the range of a specific information and its success in attracting attention as compared with the competing information. "The medium is the message" is not a metaphor: the medium is the message to the extent that objective limitations of its users affect the choice of content. If the public is overwhelmed by millions of blogs, statuses and tweets every day, what can be considered information? Obviously, it is in the eye of the spectator.

Consequently, just taking a bigger hammer ("tweet more") as usual would not produce results, both in activism or advertising, since there is more media than reality and more messages than readers. While the hype keeps growing, is it not the same familiar pattern that we saw at the beginning of the crisis which shook the core of even the strongest economic systems, when the virtual outgrew the real and began feeding on it?

In the course of human history, technological revolutions have never surrendered to any conservative ethics. On the contrary, they have always led to reshaping of the social reality so that they could be used. In the same way, our age will be characterized by a thorough transformation of values, which will result in finding a solution for the extremely difficult problem of creating an acceptably common reality for the huge majority of individuals. I am anxiously awaiting that solution.

¹ Milovanovic, G. (2004). Individuals in the Global Information Society: The Concept, Theory and Research of the Information Society (Individua u globalnom informacionom društvu: koncept, teorija i istraživanje informacionog društva). Part of the book "Global Citizens" („Globalni građani“), eds. Golcevski, N. & Milovanovic, G., Center for Research on Information Technologies (Centar za proučavanje informacionih tehnologija), Belgrade Open School (Beogradska otvorena škola). Belgrade, 2004.

² A blog dedicated to the power law in the new media: blog.blic.rs/476/Onlajn-doprinosi-globalnoj-zajednici-zakon-stepena. Version in English language: www.milovanovicresearch.com/post/1217388296/online-contributions-to-the-global-community-the-power

Goran Milovanovic

About the authors

MC Newsletter,
December 16, 2011