Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

Matt Galloway, on Metro Morning today: "Currently one degree with a high of zero today". (In fact, the prediction is for steadily dropping temperatures throughout the day, which would be a better way of summing up the day.)

It is starting to look as though one of the basic elements of functional internet literacy is awareness of power law distributions.

These show up frequently in social patterns involving either markets with immiscible goods or social networks of any significant size, and the Internet frequently involves the intersection of both. (The "Long Tail" of Chris Anderson's book title refers to the low end of a power law distribution, for example.)

People who point to a few highly successful self-published authors on Amazon as evidence that self-publishing is a gateway to success are ignoring the realities of a power-law distribution, much as people who pointed to weblogs as a way to get a voice out were a decade ago when blogging was new.

What caught my attention this morning regarding this was a segment on Metro Morning regarding a study involving teens and their use of social media. The study itself was done by a group at Centennial College and I have no doubt that certain aspects of it -- pointing out a relatively widespread willingness to ignore privacy concerns when posting to social networks, for example, or identifying hashtags related to self-promotion on twitter -- are at least grounded in real research. (On the other hand, their methodology page does not fill me with a great deal of confidence in their rigor, relating at least three "exploratory" (I assume = "focus") groups and "hundreds – possibly thousands - of hours combing social media sites, watching GIFs, decoding hashtags and generally documenting the trajectories of young people’s social identity exploration". I see no signs of mathematical rigor.)

But when I heard the author -- Debbie Gordon -- talk about some teens having hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, my immediate reaction was: "that has to be a power-law effect" -- popularity figures in a network environment are always power laws unless there's some significant constraint on them. Tails drop off rapidly in a power law distribution, and citing a few high figures does not provide a representative study.

(Even citing averages is misleading. I took the most-recently added ninety books on my LibraryThing account and then graphed them by number of members listing them. These formed a classic power curve, with a maximum value of 12,553, a minimum of 1, and an arithmetic mean of 822.833. However, 72 of the 90 books fell below the arithmetic mean, 54 were below half the mean (411), and the median was 199.5. 30 fell below 100.)

The numeric citations moved the interview from a "vaguely interesting" category into a "this is another one of those alarmist stories about how youth are going to hell in a handbasket that I've been hearing ever since I was young (when the stories bore no relation to anyone I knew)".

There have been a number of interesting discussions about how the young are adjusting to living in a panopticon society and how their values on privacy are not those of older generations. (Well, older living generations; the thegns of an Anglo-Saxon hall also had different privacy expectations, as did the inhabitants of a 16th century village.) This does not sound like a serious contribution to that discussion.

...that it ought to disturb me that CBC is reportedly planning to make Radio 2 internet-only.

However, since they lost all my sympathy when they gutted it years ago, I cannot find it in myself to be too upset about it.

This morning there was an interview on Metro Morning with Ken Lewenza, the outgoing head of the CAW, who is stepping down because he feels that someone with more energy and time to go before retirement should be the head of the new uion created by the merger of the CAW and the CEP.  The discussion turned to the issues confronting the union movement and Lewenza made the usual points about the increasing wage and power equality issues in the workplace.

And I thought "you'll have to do better than that".

He made the right points, theoretically, but there was nothing there that I could see that would appeal to the people he needs to appeal to.  Yes, lots of people are suffering from reduced incomes, flexibility, expectations, etc. ... but instead of looking at the trends and saying, "we need to get organized to respond to this" their reaction seems to be "Look at those overpaid people in union jobs; they need to be pulled down to our level".  If you're going to appeal to the current labour force, it's going to require a new twist, and probably a lot more fire in the belly.

If you're going to be forming One Big Union, you might as well at least adopt the model of the people who were serious about it, the IWW, and bring it up to date.

Occupy tried, but for all of a general willingness of just about everyone to point at the 1%, it hasn't spread or become a self-sustaining growth movement with political pull (unlike its dark mirror-image, the Tea Party or equivalent, who are responding to many of the same forces -- senses of disempowerement and lack of options -- in their own way).
There's also the problem that most of the issues aren't just with the 1%, but structural problems which implicate a much larger swathe at the top, or towards the top, of the pyramid.

There's also the problem that (except maybe at the scale of the IWW) unions may not be in the best position to respond to the current challenges.  For all of their strong points, they are very tightly tied to the current employment model (at best, they would want to replace capitalist owners with public ownership, and see how well that has worked out in North America recently for the public sector workers).  But in light of the real possibility that the only way out of the tunnel may be to shift to a leisure society where basic needs are decoupled from the need to hold a job and the status (and general burden) of labour shift radically, an attachment to a 19th-20th century labour model may not be a strength.

It's worth noting that the preindustrial model, for all of its entwinement with a scarcity economy, may be somewhere to look for partial models for that shift. Many if not most preindustrial workers worked only for as long as needed to supply their needs / wants (food, shelter, drink) and then would cut out and relax for the rest of the week.  A similar attitude might work better with a (relatively) surplus economy where only a comparatively small amount of labour (at the level of society as a whole) is required than one which emphasizes the dignity of labour and condemns taking time off as laziness.  A great deal flows from the extension of middle-class idealization of labour -- "the devil still finds work for idle hands to do" -- to both the upper and lower classes during the 19th century: people used to aspire to being idle.