Decentralized Network
Discussion
Hierarchy in Decentralized Networks
David de Ugarte:
“Hierarchies necessarily appear in every decentralised structure. The higher we are in the information pyramid, the less we will depend on others to receive information and the more possibilities of transmitting it we will have. The version of an event given by a world press agency will reach every last corner of the planet, whereas that given by the local press – even if it's located in the same place where the event is happening – will hardly cross its closest borders, even if the version given by the local press is completely different, and superior to, that given by the global agency. The statements made by the general secretary of a political party will reach all party members through internal networks, but those made by a village politician will only reach as far as the village boundaries. The capacity to transmit is the capacity to bring people together, to summon up the collective will, to act. The capacity to transmit is a precondition for political action.
And in every decentralised
structure, such a capacity
really is exclusive to very few nodes.
In distributed networks, by definition, nobody depends
exclusively on anyone else in order to send his message to
a third party. There are no unique filters. In both kinds of
network “everything is connected to everything,” but in
distributed networks the difference lies in the fact that any
transmitter doesn't have to always go necessarily through
the same nodes in order to reach others. A local newspaper
doesn't have to sell its version of an event to an agency
journalist who has just come to the area, and a local
politician in a village doesn't need to convince all his
regional and provincial colleagues in order to reach his
fellow party members in other parts of the country.”
(http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf)
Journalism as a Model of Decentralization
David de Ugarte:
“the blogger is nothing but an incarnation, in the domain of information, of the hacker, the bricoleur. He's the antiprofessional: someone who cannot be contained within the old guild categories created within the decentralised structures dependent on the great media power nodes. The idea of journalism as an activity, as a specific ability requiring specific knowledge, was born with the information industry and is really nothing new. In 1904 Joseph Pulitzer predicted that before the 20th century was over journalism schools would be granted the status of higher education institutions, like law or medical schools. When Pulitzer, a media tycoon, said this, he was expressing the needs of the then nascent decentralised information system, by contrast to the local, scattered structures of the pioneering early American journalism. Pulitzer was thinking within the framework of an industrial business model which required workers specialised in writing copy in the same way as engineers were needed to design stabilising systems. That's why he asked the education system to train them. The time for people like Mark Twain – journalistscumactivists, like the unforgettable editor of the local paper in The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance – was over.
In the 20th century, information followed the decentralised
structural pattern characteristic of the
communication networks it was based upon. Information
was a product, exclusively traded by states and by Citizen
Kanes. Those were the times of the Ford T and Taylorism,
when the old notion of “professional” was on the wane:
“professional” was coming to denote just a specialised
form of advanced training in the sciences or the
humanities. The idea of a profession as a politicalmoral
fact (i.e. to profess) was forgotten, and professions were
turned into qualifying guilds.
This is the logic of journalism as a news factory, an
irreplaceable and necessary informational mediation. This
view generates its own myths: the journalist is no longer
an activist but a technician, a necessary mediator
upholding the freedom of expression and guaranteeing the
collective right to information (“the public's right to
know”). These myths conceal an underlying reality: the
industrial information system, a classic decentralised
system in which in order to be able to publish one's
opinions or views of reality one must have a capital
equivalent to that required to set up a factory – in the same
way as in order to publish a CD or a book one still needs,
respectively, a record label and a publishing house.
In the model of the decentralised
information environment, the media used to be the guard dogs
watching over information, which was extracted by
professional journalists from reality itself, giving it its first
textual form: news. Newspapers thus were the product of
a specialised professional activity sprinkled throughout
with a series of personal opinions, valuable in that they
were supposed to be better informed due to their position
in the hierarchy tree. The mythical embodiment of the
journalist was the foreign correspondent, a decontextualised
gentleman who was sent – to considerable
expense – to faraway places where events deemed to be
newsworthy took place. The improvement of
communication systems hasn't changed or improved the
structure of this system, but only increased its immediacy
to its highest degree: hence the embeddedjournalist
in the Iraq war.
By contrast, in the digital creeper sources appear in a
hypertextual way and practically in real time, as they are
provided by participants themselves. That's why in the
new reticular structure of information the centre of
journalism is no longer the writing of copy, the conversion
of information from fact into news which used be the
purpose of journalists. Rather, what matters now is the
selection of sources which are anyway immediately and
directly available to the reader.”
(http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf)
More Information
See the article:
• The Emergence, Crisis, and Replacement of the Era of Decentralized Networks. By David de Ugarte.