The following may be very elementary, but I’m just trying to figure it out for myself. …
Websites often exhibit a pattern in which a few sites are far more popular than the rest. See, for example, this graph by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell, which plots the number of incoming links to each blog versus its popularity rank.
The graph shows enormous inequality. That is a bit counter-intuitive; we might expect that given millions of choices, people would distribute their interest evenly across the whole web. However, we want to know what’s going on in the most popular nodes of a network such as the blogosphere. Therefore, we visit those nodes and comment on them, thereby making them even more popular. In other words, network traffic tends to concentrate.
Clay Shirky thinks that blogs fall in a power-law distribution, so that the line above can be plotted as y=axk. Drezner and Farrell think the line is lognormal. That’s better news. A lognormal distribution is less steep, so it suggests that unknown websites sometimes gain popularity; the pattern is not perfectly self-reinforcing. In any case, the data clearly show a huge tilt toward top-ten sites.
Some factor must cause mass attention to focus on certain targets rather than others. That factor could be quality, but it could also be precedence–older sites will tend to beat newer ones. For instance, I can’t believe that Instapundit is orders of magnitude better than the average blog, but it is older.
Along similar lines, I observed recently that college applicants want to attend competitive universities, so that they can be exposed to other bright students and gain the reputational advantage of a degree from an institution that is known to be hard to get into. Thus we might expect the number of applications to follow a power-law distribution, with a few universities receiving overwhelming interest. But I don’t think that’s the case. The reason, surely, is that admission to a college (unlike access to a website) is selective. If you want to get into your “best” option, then you must apply to institutions to which you have a reasonable chance of being admitted. If everyone applied to Yale (currently the university with the lowest acceptance rate), then most would waste their application fee. I cannot find a table with the number of applications per institution. But I suspect that the number of applicants/per places does not vary enormously between the most competitive college in America and the nearby branch of the state university, especially if one could control for quality of education. People do tend to prefer already popular institutions; but that preference is countered by their fear of being rejected. [Yale admits 10% of applicants; University of Maryland–many rungs down the ladder–admits about 20%.]
Thanks to reader Joe Sinatra, here’s an interesting dialogue between Francis Fukuyama and Bernard-Henri L?vy (two political theorists who write best-sellers). It ends with an exchange about the role of intellectuals. BHL criticizes neoconservatives–who supported the Iraq intervention for reasons of principle–for lining up with Bush on all other issues (e.g., the death penalty, gay marriage, stem-cell research). Since they are educated and worldly people, surely they can’t be against gay rights. BHL suspects they have compromised their principles to gain access to power.
Fukuyama suggests that neoconservatives sincerely agree with Bush on these questions of social policy, much as this might shock a European. And then he makes a more general comment about intellectuals who work in institutions:
The idea that an intellectual must always speak truth to power and never compromise means for ends seems to me a rather naive view of how intellectuals actually behave, and reflects in many ways the powerlessness of European intellectuals and their distance from the real world of policy and politics. Of course, the academy must try to remain an institutional bastion of intellectual freedom that is not subject to vagaries of political opinion. But in the United States, to a much greater degree than in Europe, scholars, academics and intellectuals have moved much more easily between government and private life than in Europe, and are much more involved in formulating, promoting and implementing policies than their European counterparts. This necessarily limits certain kinds of intellectual freedom, but I’m not sure that, in the end, this is such a bad thing.
Fukuyama describes his own time at RAND, where there was no intellectual freedom but many opportunities to influence policy and learn. To which BHL replies:
That’s it. I think we have come to heart of what divides us. … The problem lies with the definition of what you and I call an intellectual, and beyond its definition, its function. Unlike you, I don’t think an intellectual’s purpose is to run the RAND Corporation or any institution like it. Not because I despise RAND, or because I believe in Kubrick’s burlesque portrayal of it. No, I just think that while some people are running RAND, others no more or no less worthy or deserving should be dealing with, shall we say, the unfiltered truth. … America needs intellectuals with a selfless concern for sense, complexity and truth.
Four observations:
1. One does not have to choose between working in powerful institutions or being fully independent and providing the “unfiltered truth.” One can also work within organizations that represent ordinary people or marginalized groups or that grow at the grassroots level. Dewey spent a lot of time in schools and settlement houses. Jane Addams’ thought was grounded in even deeper experience. Or consider Dorothy Day or various Marxist intellectuals who have worked inside independent socialist and labor organizations.
2. The independence that BHL prizes is quite hard to find. If you teach in a university, then you work for a powerful institution whose social function is subject to criticism. If you write a best-seller, then you are paid by a big media corporation. Working at RAND is not necessarily more problematic.
3. I believe in truth, but it requires method. Truth doesn’t just pop into one’s mind, even if one has graduated from the Ecole Normale Sup?rieure. Many methodologies are helpful–among them, what Fukuyama calls the “discipline” of operating in “the real world of power and politics.” I haven’t read BHL’s new book, American Vertigo, but presumably his method there is to travel and observe for short periods. I find that method quite problematic. (See Marc Cooper’s first-person description of BHL in the field.) If BHL developed a complex and novel social theory or collected data (qualitative or quantitative), I would be more impressed by his claim to “truth.”
4. Tony Judt is very insightful about “the demise of the continental [European] intellectual.* On May 31, 2003, Jacques Derrida and J?rgen Habermas (together), Umberto Eco, Richard Rorty, and several other leading intellectuals published coordinated essays about Iraq in distinguished European newspapers. The result “passed virtually unnoticed. It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathizers. No-one implored the authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward. … The whole project sputtered out. One hundred years after the Dreyfus Affair, fifty years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe’s leading intellectuals had thrown a petition–and no one came.”
Judt suggests several explanations. Intellectuals can no longer get fired up about social-liberal causes, because their position prevails across Europe. Capitalism remains a target of criticism, but no one knows what to do about it. I would add that most European intellectuals lack the discipline of working inside institutions. Such work would give them more access to truth as well as more credibility.
*Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), pp. 785-7
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CIRCLE today released a consensus report entitled “Higher Education: Civic Mission & Civic Effects.” The report was jointly written by 22 scholars representing the fields of political science, developmental pyschology, sociology, economics, philosophy, research on higher education, and women’s studies. The scholars met last fall in a conference that we jointly organized with our friends at the Carnegie Foundation. I then managed the drafting-and-revising process that led to the new report. It does the following:
emphasizes that colleges and universities have a civic purpose explores profound changes in the civic mission of universities since 1900 examines that somewhat ambiguous evidence about the effects of college attendance on students’ civic knowledge and behavior recommends certain approaches to teaching civic education at the college level discusses some obstacles to civic education, and outlines an agenda for further research
Nowadays, you can pretty much assume a one-to-one correspondence between website addresses and the names of corporations. Take a famous name like Coca Cola, Microsoft, or General Motors, add “.com,” and you’ll find a website owned by the company. However, I remember the late nineties, when sometimes a URL with a corporate name would belong to a squatter who was hoping that the big company would buy him out. And sometimes the website was used to criticize the company in question–as an exercise of free speech, in my opinion.
Perhaps the “squatters” were all bought out, or perhaps they were scared away by cease-and-desist letters like this one:
Your registration of this domain name, which is essentially identical to our client’s trademark, is likely to cause confusion, mistake and deception, and hence constitutes infringement of our client’s trademarks and copyrights, as well as constituting unfair competition. Your offering the domain name for sale constitutes “cybersquatting,” and violates our client’s trademark and copyright rights. In view of the foregoing, we demand that you immediately cancel your domain name registration and provide us with copies of the executed cancellation documents.
I do not understand all the nuances of trademark law, although this site from the Berkman Center is helpful. I can, however, venture some opinions about the public interest:
1. It is important for people to be able to express and disseminate independent views about major corporations. For that reason, we have free speech rights to use the names of corporations in print and even in prominent places like the titles of books and tv shows. The Internet is a communications medium, built originally with public funds. I see no grounds for giving companies the rights to their own names in URLs any more than they should be allowed to control the titles of books.
2. It would be possible for someone to infringe a trademark by appearing to be, say, Coca-Cola. If I took the URL cocacola.com and sold soft drinks online, I would be confusing customers and profiting from the company’s investment. That would be against the public interest. However, there is no confusion at all if I operate cocacola.com as an anti-soft-drink website. Then clearly I’m not Coca-Cola. If I lower the company’s sales by criticizing it, then Coca-Cola must answer my arguments in the public forum.
3. There seems to be a moral problem with obtaining a website that includes the name of a famous company simply in order to sell it to the firm. This is classic “squatting.” You are monopolizing a piece of the commons that you know has special value for one particular entity. I don’t think that’s admirable. However, I’m not sure that it’s worse than other forms of rent-seeking that are perfectly legal, e.g., staking a claim to the best piece of land or building a bridge at the narrowest point on a river and charging tolls. The “other” Peter Levine who owns www.peterlevine.com has inconvenienced me, but he certainly hasn’t violated my rights. Besides, if you obtain a URL that includes the name of a corporation and you sell it to the highest bidder, you are offering critics of the company a chance to buy a platform for free speech. If the company places the highest bid, it has paid a premium for fending off critics. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.
Amy Sullivan and I have something in common. Dr. Randy Brinson, the Chairman of Redeem the Vote, calls each of us periodically. Sullivan, in a piece called “When Would Jesus Bolt?” depicts Brinson’s disenchantment with the current leaders of the national conservative movement and asks whether Democrats could “change the entire electoral map” by attracting members of Redeem the Vote, thereby “peel[ing] off a few percentage points” from the GOP’s religious-conservative constituency. Sullivan is especially interested in Brinson because “Redeem the Vote registered more voters than all of the efforts of the Christian Right heavyweights–Focus on the Family, the Southern Baptist Convention, American Family Association, and the Family Research Council–combined.”
To put my reaction bluntly: Sullivan wants to use Brinson and his people just as the Republicans have: strategically. Like Karl Rove, she wants to have some conservative evangelical voters in her column (although she’d settle for a smaller proportion). She’s thinking about what shifts in rhetoric, emphasis, and actual policy the Democrats could make to “peel off” some evangelical Christians.
Strategy is necessary in politics. If you think you have good ideas and core principles, then you should try to win elections to implement them. In order to win a national election, you need an ideologically diverse majority coalition. And to get to 51% or higher, you need to win over some strange bedfellows by making political compromises or by finding partially overlapping goals. To shun all strategic thinking is simply to cede the field.
Nevertheless, strategic thinking can corrupt. Winning can become an end in itself. Any tactic or position that builds the coalition becomes desirable. Anyone not already on your side becomes a target who should be talked into joining for any reason that works. You may listen to opponents to find openings, but not to learn new ideas and perspectives.
It’s precisely this kind of corruption that has made Brinson mad at the Republicans (who are indeed very strategic at this late point in the “conservative revolution”). If Brinson gets the same treatment from Democrats, he’s not likely to admire them either. So let me suggest an alternative ….
I start with the assumption that there are principled conservatives who basically disagree with principled liberals about some core issues. Their differences cannot just be compromised away but must be contested in elections. Nevertheless, it is very valuable for liberals and conservatives to address issues that do not divide them. Brinson models such collaboration when he works with civil-libertarian groups to promote a Bible course that is truly appropriate for public schools.
Moreover, liberals and conservatives can work together to improve the political system and the political culture in which they both operate. Again, Brinson is a model: his form of voter mobilization increases turnout without manipulating new voters into lockstep support for any one party. He is enlarging the base of genuinely active, independent voters. That’s a goal that many principled progressives share, and there would be ways to coordinate their efforts.
Brinson also expresses sincere respect for liberal groups like People for the American Way. Such displays of respect are important. Many Americans shun politics because they dislike conflict, especially when it seems petty, unnecessary, or personal. I’m convinced that our highly conflictual political culture suppresses participation. If evangelical conservatives sincerely respect their liberal opponents, politics will seem more constructive and will draw in more citizens. But the converse is equally important. Liberals like Amy Sullivan must sincerely respect people like Randy Brinson. Respect means not using others as means to one’s own ends. (Compare this subtle argument about why one should usually overlook one’s opponents’ hypocrisy.)