in reply to Re: Public and private communication
in thread Public and private communication

I don't define important as making money - but money is an indicator of importance. If people want to pay for something they do consider that as an important thing, at least for them. Perhaps for the society as whole one 'chit chat' talk of friends is not that important but the sum of a huge number of those talks is important. I would argue it is a kind of a social lubricant making the whole machinery to operate more smoothly. I don't write here a scientific article - so I feel, I can be a bit less rigorous that the cited Oldyzko paper. They just analyze the data they have obtained from some trusted source - I need to speculate on some data for which I don't have such a source.

If people want to pay more for the private communication than for the public one then in a free market economy the private communication would dominate in the volume too (since the cost of sending both kinds of information is the same). Beside that I believe a very large part of the sent public information is never consumed (read/heard/watched) – nobody reads whole newspapers, while on the private side this is quite different and, if you cut out spam messages, I believe nearly whole of the private information is consumed. And the information must be consumed to have any social effect (contrary to the economical side where the sending of the information must be taken into account).

In the Oldyzko paper they define what is public and what is private communication by some attributes of it – this is just a technique used to simplify the arguments. I believe everybody would agree with me that public is what is exposed to general view (from Merriam-Webster OnLine). But if they use this definition they would have to prove that what is exposed to general view does indeed carry those attributes that they take for the definition of public – this might be difficult to be reached in a scientific manner, but I believe intuitively is quite obvious.

I don’t want to diminish the value of the public communication. I rather treat it as some kind of product that is produced by the whole machinery of the online community. All I wanted to demonstrate is that the private communication is an undervalued part of the machinery.

I feel that the general attitude here at PM is that every piece of information has some positive value – and since you can deduce some true information from nearly every node then deleting any node diminishes the value of the site. I can’t agree with that. As an argument I’d like to recall the (really entertaining) “The Sixth Sally, or How Trurl and Klapaucius Created a Demon of the Second Kind to Defeat the Pirate Pugg.” short story by Lem (in ISBN 0156027593). The Second Kind Demon which produces huge amounts of true if unneeded information is something we all encounter in Internet today. The value of every information is really relative, and might be even negative if it creates an obstacle in searching for the information you need. A personal note does have some value for the receiver but might be an obstacle when searching for more substantial information. Just writing this it occurred to me that there is one distinction – a personal note usually has a very temporal value, you rarely need to search for them.

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Re^3: Public and private communication
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jul 02, 2003 at 12:40 UTC
    I don't define important as making money - but money is an indicator of importance.

    I know. However, the paper was discussing the economic viability of funding from the commercial content industries (film, music, etc.) It wasn't judging the relative importance or worth of public vs private communication. It doesn't discuss that distinction.

    In your OP you said:

    The thesis of the article is that in telecommunication connectivity is much more important than content delivery

    and that's only true if you define "important" as "makes more money".

    I don't write here a scientific article - so I feel, I can be a bit less rigorous that the cited Oldyzko paper.

    Fair enough, but your OP drew a conclusion from evidence that wasn't in the paper. For some reason this tends to annoy academics :-)

    The paper doesn't compare public and private communication - it compares commercially produced content and everything else.

    In the Oldyzko paper they define what is public and what is private communication by some attributes of it – this is just a technique used to simplify the arguments.

    Once again - the paper does not comparing private and public communication. It is very explicitly discussing the revenues from commercially produced content. Non commercial content can still be public (the content on perlmonks being an example).

    I believe everybody would agree with me that public is what is exposed to general view

    Indeed. Unfortunately, since Oldyzko's paper didn't separate public and private communication funding I don't see how you can draw conclusions about public and private communication from it.

    All I wanted to demonstrate is that the private communication is an undervalued part of the machinery.

    Please do. I've not seen any evidence so far :-)

    In my personal experience, and from everything I've read, the problems of building useful communities are in the creation of good public artifacts. The problem people find is that private communication is overrated and public communication is underrated.

    I feel that the general attitude here at PM is that every piece of information has some positive value

    I don't think this is true. Perlmonks' reputation system is built around judging the worth of a nodes content and authors contributions.

    I'm not arguing against artist's suggestion. I quite like it, the majority of those who can be bothered to vote agree, and there are some suggestions on how the feature can be implemented on the client side.

    However the idea that private communication in an online community is more important that public communication is flatly contradicted by my personal experience in helping develop online communities, and by every piece of research I've read on the matter.

    Oldyzko's paper doesn't discuss the distinction between public and private communication so can't be used to argue the issue either way.

[reply]
      I am enjoying this conversation, and just have a couple of points to add to it.

      First of all not only does Odlyzko not discuss public vs private, he also doesn't really discuss commercial vs non-commercial. For instance in the point to point category he includes phones. But telephone companies generate substantial fractions (the majority?) of their revenue from calls involving companies, most of whose traffic is likely to be commercial in nature. What he really discusses is whether broadcast commercial content can pay for a peer to peer network. (No.)

      Furthermore the public vs private distinction and the broadcast vs peer to peer one both seem to me to have a hazy boundary that is fuzzy and fading fast. At one point to engage in public broadcasting of information was fairly difficult. It needed substantial facilities for production and distribution. This barrier to entry created businesses whose natural job was to be a bottle-neck between would-be content creators and potential content consumers. Both natural bottlenecks are fading because of improvements in technology, but organizations of those companies are attempting to create new barriers to protect their businesses. (Think RIAA and MPAA.)

      However there is a growing group of semi-public, semi-broadcast models. Part of it is in online forums like this one. Publically mirrored email lists. Blogging. Online comic strips. And so on and so forth.

      These are publically accessible. But the vast majority of the content produced is consumed by small groups of people who mostly know each other. This is public in the same way that my conversation with friends on a street is public - someone walking behind us can listen in. In reality it is basically peer (me) to peer (small circle of friends). However straightforward power laws indicate that you will see an entire spectrum from personal discussion up to circulation numbers that professional columnists can respect. With no division between them.

      Of course this is communication without commercial aspirations behind it. From Odlyzko's point of view, it makes broadcast payments even less able to pay for content. (A trend which doesn't make companies based on generating profits from broadcast bottlenecks very happy...) But I find it an interesting blurring of boundaries as what had been a private activity (talking among friends) shades into clearly public consequences.

[reply]

        All true - what interesting times we live in!

        People will carry on making money from content production - quite probably in new and interesting ways (witness the way PayPal and Amazon's donation system have become a poor-mans micro-payment system). Some middle men will bite the dust, but I won't shed too many tears about that ;-)

        Things like blogs, Wiki's, FOAF, etc. are fascinating teasers of the way that communication and information sharing strategies are changing. Especially now that the net is becoming ubiquitous in many areas. It's odd to think that in less than ten years everybody in my social circle has gone online - techie or not. That's going to change things in interesting ways.

[reply]
      I feel the main point in your critics is:
      The paper doesn't compare public and private communication - it compares commercially produced content and everything else.
      I must admit it is a good point and I was a bit slopy using the article. They do concentrate on the economic side of things, but the data they collected to support their thesis is more about public and private communication than commercially and noncommercially produced content. What they compare is mass media (which is clearly public) and communication i.e. phone and post (which I would describe as nearly entirely private). So I just used more their data than their analysis.

      I must admit I don't have any experiences in developing online communities (other then participating in a few of them). So all of my arguments are just speculations.

      Perhaps public/private is wrong distinction, perhaps it indeed should all be public in the sense that it would be available to everybody, but just some part of the information, addressed individually, would be by default filtered out by all others then the individuall (althogh by a change in the settings they could view it).

[reply]
        What they compare is mass media (which is clearly public) and communication i.e. phone and post (which I would describe as nearly entirely private).

        I think you might be surprised. The postal service transports a lot of things that don't fit under "private" communications (e.g. newspapers and magazines). As for the phone system - I hear that this "World Wide Web" thingy is taking off and using up quite a bit of bandwidth :-)

        Bulk wise, public wins. Profit wise, private wins.

        Perhaps public/private is wrong distinction

        Possibly. For example, look at the blogsphere where you're getting conversations built around authors rather than topics. It's all interesting stuff.

[reply]

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