Networks, Markets, and the Impact of Structure

Jeff Jarvis has has some really good stuff on his blog lately related to organizational structures. He links to a piece in Wired by Adam Penenberg about abolishing the FCC. The issue, as I see it, is that some mechanism needs to allocate share of the spectrum. The contraversy is over whether or not the FCC should regulate broadcast content. The answer, I think is technological and found in Jarvis' other posts. If you had the choice of getting news, information, and entertainment, but as a consequence you had to accept obscenity, vulgarity, brutality, and other messages you rejected directed at your kids, many people would (and have) said no. The low tech way to do this is to turn your TV into nothing more than a device for watching recorded selected media (DVD or VCR). Its not hard to find people with little kids who only let them watch videos, no TV. If we are stuck with TV, and TV is going to push the lines of the acceptable some regulation is required if large numbers of people won't simply be drummed out of the market. However, Jarvis directs us to Lost Remote's coverage of TiVo's move away from cable and to the PC; to a Yahoo story about Microsoft desire to "help millions of consumers stay seamlessly plugged into a world of digital music, movies, video games and television shows;" and a Reuters story about A&E Television Netowrks (A&E, HIstory Channel, and Biography Channel) and National Geographic "will use the Internet to broadcast programs in a deal with video-on-demand company Akimbo Systems."

Under such conditions, where PC's will provide content, and content will be on-demand, rather than scheduled for air, who cares what the broadcasters do. If people can get the information, news, and entertainment they want without anything they don't want, no one needs to regulate content, because every gets exactly what they want (subject to availability). This is how the market liberates us from regulation.

In a later post, Jarvis directs us to Lost Remote again, where Cory Bergman observes that TV is mistaking internet for a rival, when they should regard it as another medium for their content. What I find interesting is that this is exactly what the movie studios did with TV fifty years ago. Movies originally took a hostile view to TV as somthing that would compete with movies before they realized that movie studios could both show their catalogues on TV as well as make TV shows directly. Its no accident that after the radio netoworks which started TV (NBC, CBS, ABC) subsequent entries to TV have been movie studios (WB, Fox, Paramount).

In a more theoretical vein, Jarvis also links to Susan Crawford's blog where she discusses the new social order of "gecyberschaft." Jarvis offers gememeschaft instead, and I will offer gebyteschaft as my coinage for the idea. Mary Ann Allison of the Allison Group has coined "gecyberschaft" to refer to the new social order in the process of replacing gesellschaft (the industrial, or modern society) which itself replaced gemeinschaft (the agricultural, or pre-modern society). Now we've had this thing under some observation for a while, as my pre-modern, modern, and implied post-modern corespondences reveal. But while I think there is something going on here to say that the information age will produce different social networks than the industrial age did, both of which were different from the agrarian age, I think its easy to make to much of this, just as Ferdinand Tonnies and his followers did. The problems with this model, which in English is often identified by the use of the word "community" in sociological writing, is that it its not accurate. The earliest thinkers to embrace this dicotomy were concerned with "the world we have lost", as Peter Laslett put it in his important book's title. Gemeinschaft was idealized, and gemeinschaft portrayed as vacant and unsatisfying. This remained the model used by sociologists up to the current day. Its not hard to find the agrarian past portrayed as a happy world of extended families, communities, and an absence of deviant behavior. As David Warren Sabean argued in his groundbreaking book, Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, the pre-modern society was no more free of deviance, strife, and conflict as our modern society, and that people's ties were ust as fragmented and liable to extend considerable distances as our own. His recent book, Kinship in Neckarhausen (which I have not yet read) appears to take the same position against the community concept, as seen in this review in the Journal of Social History. Indeed, I have argued on paper that Sabean's entire career is an attack on the concept of gemeinschaft and community. If the original basis of the model is flawed, why extend it? According to Allison, "In gemeinschaft, your status was ascribed (based on birth); in gesellschaft, it was achieved; and now, in gecyberschaft, it's assessed." But one can immediatly follow up with the question, is there achievement without assessment? Or ask, isn't assessment one of the key parts of a community, in which a figure like Sherriff Taylor knows the community so well that he can employ a context-based policing, rather than a strict by-the-book policing which his deputy might have employed?

Its hardly a surprise that anthropology is the best tool for wacking at sociological catagories. Sociology, one should never forget is a part of the intellectual project of Positivism, its not an academic discipline, but an early form of the kind of advocacy academics of which the various "studies" programs are such an obvious example.

To bring this all home, I would argue that new technologies like the internet, cable, and satalite don't create new social forms, but that people demand the society serve them usefully. (Functionalism alert.) Were people ever satisfied with TV and broadcast media, or did people always find it lacking in the same ways we do today (or perhaps in reverse, that is broadcast media are either inoffensive or they are edgy and so someone is always unhappy) but simply didn't have the means to do much about it, except abstain. If you had the choice to get information, news, and entertainment from an on-demand source, rather than a sceduled source which might insert its own ideas about what you want to see, wouldn't you choose it, and wouldn't people just as much prefered it in 1940 as they do today. The fact that as people get access to things outside the pop charts via Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes what they are buying is the forgotten, obscure titles rather than what they could have found at Blockbuster doesn't tell us that tastes have changed, it tells us that the old distribution channels never satisfied taste. Gecyberschaft? I don't think so.