Friday, December 14, 2007

Yeah, OK, I'm legendarily lazy and disorganized. That's why I only just

a) got some important bureaucracy done today, which I may tell you about soon

and

b) finally got a copy of the paper I gave at the Wittgenstein Symposium in August up on the web.

It's basically an introduction to Netocracy with hints about tying it in with social network analysis. But not fully developed. Nevertheless, I think it's worth reading if you're interested in knowing more about why I'm a "left netocrat". At least, about the netocrat side. I still have to write my left-wing take on the whole thing.

Oh, and it's in Word ... don't blame me, that's what they asked for ... (oh, all right, blame me then, because I should get round to putting it in HTML and other neutral formats too ... what was that about lazy and disorganized again?)

2 comments:

John Powers said...

Great to see your paper on the Web. I exported it to PDF to read it. Maybe that doesn't qualify as a neutral format, but it is easier to read in that format.

I was impressed by the word "imploit" which I hadn't seen before, but the notion is important.

Composing said...

Well "imploit" is Bard and Soderqvist's own word. I think it's the key to the whole thing, really. That's what sets Netocracy theory apart from say "attention economy" / "wealth of networks" / "new economy" type thinking.

Not that "attention" isn't an essentially important idea too in netocracy, but "imploitation" reveals a different character.

If you believe it's all about "attention" then simply *maximizing* your number of connections is a good thing. It's all about openness and inclusion and transparency.

Blogging is an attention economy. Ebay, Google, Myspace, Craiglist etc. are attentional. They are "markets"

Netocracy OTOH is about hoarding and managing links. Facebook, AlwaysOn, aSmallWorld ... these are netocratic.

Netocracy is about closedness, exclusion and conspiracy.

Imploitation is your way of navigating this world.

Manipulation of links is the equivalent of manipulation of money in capitalism. You "invest" links to get better links. Curators will enforce "netiquette" by removing links (excluding you from valuable networks) which is the equivalent of being "fined". etc ... etc ...