At 06:04 PM 5/10/96 EDT, E. ALLEN SMITH wrote:

From: IN%"blancw@MICROSOFT.com" "Blanc Weber" 10-MAY-1996 16:21:20.63

...

The more automated that filtering becomes, so that the viewer (be it an adult or a child) requires less and less personal involvement in evaluating what is appropriate (or even interesting) for themselves, the more weak & piddly (ignorant & psychologically dependent) those people could become, falling into the habit of having others - or an automatic robocop -

I was talking about this with one of the other students giving the presentation on RSACi yesterday at Sloan. I was argueing how vice tends to be associated with radicalism and how it seems to break people out of their exclusive communities... (nevermind, it was a weird complex discussion.) Regardless, I ran a roundtable on a topic similar to this. The problem of information sharing agents evolving into exclusive communities over time. _______________________________________________ Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 20:25:20 -0500 To: roundtable@rpcp.mit.edu From: "Joseph M. Reagle Jr." <reagle@rpcp.mit.edu> Subject: Roundtable 2/21: M. Van Alstyne - COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AND THE RISE OF AN INFORMATION ELITE COMMUNICATION NETWORKS AND THE RISE OF AN INFORMATION ELITE Do Computers Help the Rich Get Richer? Marshall Van Alstyne (MIT Sloan School) CAMBRIDGE ROUNDTABLE Wed, Feb. 21, at 1:00 E40-212 Several researchers have suggested that information resources are not created equal and that information processing capacity is not distributed uniformly. In 1995, for example, only 17% of the adult population in the US and Canada, roughly 35 million people had any form of access to electronic services. But what if access were universal? If each enterprise and individual were granted a digital portal onto a National Information Infrastructure, would equal access to channels mean equal access to information? One unfortunate answer is no. Circumstances exist under which a telecommunications policy of universal access could lead to an increase in the gap between the information "haves" and the "have-nots." Policy needs to provide incentives for information sharing and not just access to channels, otherwise results might be reversed from those originally intended. We present a formal theory of information sharing in groups which shows why the information rich might get richer still, why there might be balkanization of groups on the internet, why different objectives within a group will motivate sharing or shut it down, and why it's not just what you know but whom you know. One of the advantages of the model is that there are several explicit parameters that can be altered to illustrate different effects of different policies. For anyone who is interested, the first draft of the paper is available from URL: http://web.mit.edu/marshall/www/home.html _______________________ Regards, Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words. -Spinoza Joseph Reagle http://farnsworth.mit.edu/~reagle/home.html reagle@mit.edu E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E