Internet not egalitarian, its all about popularity. I think this
paper sums up sgforums nicely. LoL
An egalitarian Internet? Not so, UGA study
says
Athens, Ga. – The Internet is often thought of as a forum that
enables egalitarian communication among people from diverse
backgrounds and political persuasions, but a University of Georgia
study reveals that online discussion groups display the same
hierarchical structure as other large social groups.
“About 2 percent of those who start discussion threads attract
about 50 percent of the replies,” said study author Itai Himelboim,
assistant professor in the UGA Grady College
of Journalism and Mass Communication. “So although we have this
wide range and diversity of sources, only a few of them are
actually attracting attention.”
Himelboim, whose latest findings appear in the early online
edition of the journal Communication Research, examined discussions
among more than 200,000 participants in 35 newsgroups over a
six-year period. He focused his analysis on political and
philosophical newsgroups on Usenet, the oldest Internet discussion
platform, and is currently exploring patterns of communication in
newer social networking services, such as Twitter.
To identify the differences, if any, that exist in the content
posted by popular participants and their less popular counterparts,
Himelboim and colleagues Eric Gleave and Marc A. Smith of Connected
Action Consulting Group examined the content of a subset of the
messages. Only 12 percent of messages from the popular posters
presented their own comments and opinions; most of the time, they
simply imported content from other news sources. Of the imported
content, 60 percent came from traditional media, such as The New
York Times, CNN and other national and local
outlets, while 8 percent came from blogs and personal websites.
Fifteen percent of posts used content from online-only news sites,
and 6 percent of posts used content from government and nonprofit
organizations.
“For the news media, these findings are pretty encouraging,”
Himelboim said. “We still need someone to go out and search for
information to bring it to us, and that’s a traditional
journalistic role.”
For those who fancy the Internet as a great equalizer that
brings equality to the voices of the masses, however, the findings
suggest that it could never meet that lofty ideal. Himelboim said
he wasn’t surprised to find that online discussion groups tend to
become hierarchical. Even in grade school, he pointed out,
everybody wants to be friends with the most popular kid.
What did surprise Himelboim was that the larger the group gets,
the more skewed the network of interactions becomes. People exhibit
what’s called a preferential attachment toward those with many
connections, which suggests that having many connections makes it
easier to make more connections. Himelboim said that because people
can only spend so much time communicating with others, the growth
of these so-called hubs comes at the expense of their
less-connected counterparts.
In a related study that randomly assigned nearly 200
participants to one of several simulated forums, Himelboim and his
colleagues found that posting high-quality content is necessary for
attracting attention-but not sufficient. That is, high quality
posts with few replies drew few additional replies and never became
hubs.
So what does one need to do to attract attention on the
Internet?
“That’s the million dollar question,” Himelboim said. ‘But just
posting a lot will not make you a hub for attracting
attention.”
lol
