Perfect media equality is impossible. There has never been anything close to “equal outcomes” when it comes to the distribution or relative success of old media: books, magazines, music, movies, book, theater tickets, etc. A small handful of titles have always dominated, usually according to a classic “power law” or “80-20? distribution, with roughly 20% [...]
Thanks to Mashable, we clearly see power laws at work on Twitter. While many protest this as evidence of “media inequality,” the “non-tweeting will always be with us” (to paraphrase Jesus’s comment about the persistence of “the poor”)—and this is nothing to get bent out of shape about, as Adam has explained.
“Liberty upsets patterns.” That was one of the many lessons that the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick taught us in his 1974 masterpiece “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” What Nozick meant was that there is a fundamental tension between liberty and egalitarianism such that when people are left to their own devices, some forms of inequality [...]
Mark Cuban penned a sharp piece over the weekend entitled “Who Cares What People Write?” in which he explains why people shouldn’t get too worked up about what they might read about themselves (or their organizations) online since, chances are, very few people are ever going to see it anyway. To explain why, Cuban identifies [...]