Re: Re^3: Public and private communication

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).

Comment on Re: Re^3: Public and private communication

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Re: Re: Re^3: Public and private communication by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jul 03, 2003 at 10:50 UTC
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]
Re: Re: Re: Re^3: Public and private communication by zby (Vicar) on Jul 03, 2003 at 11:41 UTC
The newspaper/magazines part was specially treated in the article and their argumentation about subsidizing should be applicable here as well. They present much data from time that WWW had not too much impact on the economy - the most detailed data table covers two years 1994 and 1997, at least at 1994 there were not that much WWW trafic. Even if the proportion is in favor of public it is not so much as here. I can't say how much private messages other users receive, but mine sum up to much less than a 1% of the information I read from PM. Following tilly the distinction between public and private becomes more fuzzy with usage of internet - there are forums in the whole spectrum between private and public. But that's not all, there are fora that are more private in one aspect of being private while in some other they are more public. So the two value system first becomes a linear system, then it becomes a multidimentional space. I feel we need some new distinctions to describe and analyze that. A good example is the chatter box - it is public in the sense that it is evailable to everyone, while it is a private because at each period of time the message is addressed to a closed audience.	[reply]