With this new pattern of use, the DVR jeopardizes the old business models that are offered by companies such as the Nielsen Media Research which tries to accurately catalogue what viewers watch.  Tivo has a feature which communicates with a central database through the phone line and sends all the actions the viewer makes, from which channel they recorded to changes they made in the volume. The information sent from each Tivo is compiled in the central database. This function disrupts companies specializing in identifying people’s viewing behaviors by performing an intricate procedure of sampling. Under the diffusion of the DVR, their main business, assessing of the price of commercial segments, will no longer be meaningful.

Uprising of this formidable technology, the television and the media research industries have a couple of options to contend against it. Matt Carlson in his book, Tapping into Tivo, points to two ways to interrupt new technologies that can be a threat to the television industry. One is to draw those companies into law suits with complaints such as the copy right violations. It is not necessary to win the case. With their enormous financial resources, media companies can suffocate those rather small companies monetarily through legal efforts. This tactic was applied to SonicBlue, a company that attempted to sell DVRs with a function to skip commercials. With a series of costly law suits by seven companies that included Disney, NBC, Viacom, SonicBlue filed for bankruptcy before the law suit was settled.

Another way to interrupt new technologies is rather more friendly; gaining control of the companies by investing in them. As a matter of fact, a certain amount of Tivo’s shares are owned by NBC, CBS, Discovery and Comcast. Developing strong ties with those media giants, Tivo has chosen the way to cultivate a new market that can be profitable to both sides by collecting accurate information about people’s viewing habits and selling the data to media companies. This new strategy seems to be a very smart move. It solves the conflict between the television industry and the DVR manufacturers, as well as developing a new market of “people’s personal data”.

Many say that DVRs and the threat they bring to the television industry are similar to the Sony Betamax VCR, the first consumer video recorder that turned the television industry upside down thirty years ago. In the VCR case, the television stations and the movie companies backed off fighting with video manufacturers after they found that the profit that the pre-recorded video market created surpassed the loss that VCRs brought to the media industry.

Tivo and Betamax cases have one thing in common. Sony and Tivo ended up cooperating with existing media companies, such as the television and the movie industry, as well as the media research companies, and developed new markets with new technologies such as VCRs and DVRs. Carlson wrote, “The development of new media technology is far from independent from existing media structures.” I cannot agree more with him. What the SonicBlue case is telling us is that all the disruptive technologies can not survive without acting in concert with the contents creators, such as the television stations and the movie studios.  No technologies can thrive in markets without the consent of other companies and the consumers. Then one question comes up to me. When did they get the consent of us, the suppliers of their new commodity, people’s viewing behavior?

Carlson, Matt. Tapping into Tivo: Digital video recorders and the transition from schedules to surveillance in television, New Media society 2006; 8; 97

I believe in democracy. I believe that it is the world as it should be. In the past, creating a government that reflected all the people’s thoughts and opinions was technically impossible. However, in the case of the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary, it showed a new direction which moved closer to ideal democracy.

 In the 2006 Connecticut Senate race, Ned Lamont was new to most of the state Democrats, but he challenged the three-term incumbent Senator, Joe Lieberman, with less than five months to the primary. It seemed foolishly bold. What made this rather audacious attempt possible was the blogosphere sites, such as DailyKos.com, MyDD.com, as well as the local sites such as MyLeftNutmeg.com. The community of democrats that formed around those weblogs chose, and supported Lamont as the rival candidate of Liberman.

People who contributed to and followed the blogosphere sites were not united in supporting Lamont from the beginning. The initial momentum that goaded them to support Lamont was an “anti-Liberman” mentality, created by his pro-war, pro-Republican attitude. This dissatisfaction eventually led them to vet other Democratic candidates such as Lowell Weicker, and Ned Lamont. Through their discussions on the web, people finally reached the decision that the anti-war, purely Democratic Lamont was the best choice. Then they went on to the next stage of promoting Lamont, raising money, and even acquiring the legitimacy for him to run for the primary, and actually win

The process that they went through, especially the fund raising, used to be done only by the party. Pirch writes, “The party elite controlled the mechanism to raise money and contact the party members; any candidate who wanted to win the party’s nomination needed the blessing of the party.”  Thus, holding a grass-roots insurgent campaign often turned out to be a vain effort.

It is no longer like that.  Information technologies allow people to form a voluntary support group readily. As they showed in the Connecticut Senate race, they can select a candidate, and promote him or her through weblogs, including raising money.

This whole event reminds me of the story Clay Shirky introduced in his book, (Shirkey Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization.) In spite of a series of child abuse incidents, the only action the Catholic Church took with Father John Georghan was to transfer him from parish to parish, covering up the fact of the abuse. However, a group formed by lay membership, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), efficiently united the “like-minded” people who had strong discontent toward the decisions of Catholic Church that were only made to cover up the incidents. Their protest movement drew world wide attention and finally made the Catholic Church retire the Father. Shirky pointed out that the key to VOTF’s success was attributed to “removing two old obstacles-locality of information, and barriers to group reaction.” Before the Internet era, lay membership who resented the child abuse incident simply had no means to communicate with other concerned church members who were scattered around the country. With the new social communication tool, VOTF successfully gathered and united those people.

In the Lamont campaign, the majority of the donations and support were coming from outside of Connecticut. Media sites such as DailyKoss, MyDD, and Youtube especially contributed to the anti- Liberman feeling by circulating the controversial video that captured the moment Liberman was kissed by President Bush, which ignited the nation’s widely developed animosity toward Liberman’s intimacy with the President and the Republican Party.  Like the VOTF, discontent toward the “ancient regime” drove them to support Lamont using grass root tool actions. Social communication tools acted as an important role in both cases.

I think that this pattern of activism using the internet and specifically, political blogs will be more common. This trend can change the conventional political organizations, especially local political parties which can be challenged by political blogospheres. I think that the blogosphere will establish its presence as a mediator, or a watch dog, between parties and its members, collecting people’s voices, criticizing authorized candidates and if necessary, backing challengers. The 2006 Connecticut primary presented a possibility of a productive relationship between the parties and blogospheres and took the political world in a new direction moving us closer to ideal democracy.

Pirch, Kevin A. Bloggoers at the Gates, Social Science Computer Review 2008 26

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody, The Penguin Press

2006 Connecticut Democratic Primary was a significant mile stone for the election of Internet era. Ned Lamont’s defeat of incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman, who ran as the nominee of the Connecticut for Lieberman party, was accomplished by making a blogosphere consisted of people who had been developing opposition toward him. Despite the initial support of all the state’s major elected officials, Lieberman lost to Lamont in primary.

In this article, the author Kevin Pirch argued that the blogs by uniting like-minded individuals is a major key of Lamont’s success, and hinted that this tendency possibly change the future of American political system.

Pirch points out three essential functions for parties.

1, Uniting like-minded individuals

2, Vetting all possible candidates

3, Finding the candidate that best represents those views

In 2006 election in Connecticut, those functions were successfully implemented by bloggers and social network services. No less important is the fact that there had been a strong animosity lingering in Connecticut liberals, which became a centripetal force to unite people. My argument is that strong feeling toward “ancien regime” is inevitable to bring out the power of blogosphere for whatever the purpose is.

In the book, “Here Comes Everybody”, Clay Shirky introduced the story about the people who began the opposition campaign toward Catholic Church to condemn child abusing father. The group formed by lay membership, VOTF, efficiently united all the domestic brethren and promoted the scandal to national level. Shirky said, “Today, with social tools, it is organizational participation by the laity.”  In the Lamont campaign, voters showed their ability to function as a part of the party.

We should remember, though, that blogosphere itself is usually a sheep without a shepherdthere should be a kind of a dissident feeling to revive the autonomy of a blogosphere to be functional.  

It is certain that the digital divide is a global issue now. The gap of Internet penetration ratio between the developed world and the developing world is great, but in the long run, I believe that the problem that Andrew Chadwick called “skills divide” will be even more serious. 

 Even now, the skill divide has started to pull our society apart. For one thing, some people still use an obsolete dial-up connection, while the others use high-speed connections. Some do just a plain net surfing, while the others do complicated researches. In 2003, the use of the Internet in the United States reached 71%. (UCLA Center for Communication Policy).  Even if it has not reached the saturation point, most people can access the vast information found in cyberspace. It is convenient to think that The United States is overcoming the digital divide issue. Other developing countries will also overcome the digital divide as the cost of the equipment and the provider fees become more affordable, or free. As technologies are advancing, the methods of Internet access are varying, from dial-up to broad band, from LAN to WiFi, from i-Phones to sophisticated computers equipped with high performance processors. As far as accessing cyberspace, all of these equipment technologies enable access equally. But there is a huge gap between them in terms of their capabilities.  This gap creates a new type of problem, the skills divide, the technical and knowledgeable difference among the Internet users.

 I read an interesting article “Cellular phone crowds with no skill” (Nikkei BP 2006 ) about the Japanese Internet environment. Japan’s Internet penetration rate for households in 2004 was 58 percent (International Telecommunication Union).  Yet the statistics published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications quoted 88%. The reason for  this discrepancy is cellular phone use.  It has been awhile since Internet access from cellular phones has became popular in Japan. A considerable number of people now use cellular phones as their main device to access the Internet. In a survey taken in 2003, the percentage of those who used cellular phones as the only access device was 12%.  The article argued that an economical bipolarization trend has been advancing in Japanese society, and this bipolarization expedites the phenomena of staying away from computers.

In the new millennium, a stratum called the “new impoverished” has emerged in Japanese society. This stratum mainly consists of retired elders and uneducated youth with the annual income of less than 30,000 dollars. Their main use of the Internet [was] is web surfing and e-mailing, and they use their cellular phones exclusively, rather than paying ISP fees. A cellular phone with a relatively good resolution screen (800*480) covers Yahoo’s main page that has the width of 800 dots. It is enough for the basic net surfing, watching YouTube clips, sending e-mails, and playing with social network services. As a result, they never have the occasion to be familiar with the basic business software, such as Word and Excel.

According to the article, this demographic population has very poor computer skills, and that puts them into a vicious cycle where their low income limits access to higher computer skills which causes a limiting of their job opportunities. It is ironic that Japanese cellular phone technology is obviously reinforcing the skills divide in Japan. As Chadwick mentioned, one huge difference between TV and Internet is that the skill level of the user drastically affects its accomplishment. Availability of less expensive, easy to use devices can possibly boost the skill divide issue. I think it is very likely to happen in the future, especially in the developing countries such as the ones in Africa, who need to rely on wireless infrastructure.

As the technologies surrounding the internet are advancing and becoming more sophisticated, the digital divide will turn into a skill divide and linger much longer. 

2004 was the first Presidential election where bloggers played very significant role. Howard Dean was the first presidential candidate who utilized blogs effectively, by letting his supporter’s blogs unite and successfully made a blogosphere for his campaign. Back then, although only 9 % of Internet users declared themselves as “frequent readers” of political weblogs, their influence was becoming stronger. People from the mainstream media noticed the value of news offered by some extraordinary bloggers and started to put them under constant observation.

The research for this article was conducted a couple of months before the 2004 election. The purpose of this research was to identify and evaluate the structure of a political blogosphere, to be more specific, to study the patterns and the result of linking of those political blogs.

At first, Golan and Banning chose 40 of the top notch political blogs, 20 from liberal blogs and the other 20 from conservative blogs. Golan and Banning also studied a large network of almost 1000 political blogs for a representative view of the liberal and conservative blogs. They constructed a citation network by identifying whether a URL present on the page of one blog referenced another political blog.

The results are below.

・91% of the links in both liberal and conservative blogs stayed within the community. The links between liberal blogs and conservative blogs were rare.

・84% of conservative blogs linked to at least one other blog. 82% received a link.

・74% of Liberal blogs linked to another blog.

・Conservative blogs averaged  15.1 links. while liberal blogs averaged  13.6.links

  It should be noted that this difference is because the higher proportion of liberal blogs had no links at all.

What this result suggests is that conservative bloggers are more united, appreciating interactions in the community, while liberal bloggers tends to be more independent.

They also conducted a close research from August 24, 2004 to November 15, 2004. In this period, a total of 22,884 posts were made on the top 40 blogs.

12,470 were on the left leaning blogs.

10,414 were on the conservative blogs.

The researchers compared the citation behavior in those posts, by counting the number of posts in which each blog cited another blog.

The results are below.

・Liberal bloggers cited one another 1511 times

・Conservative bloggers cited one another 2110 times.

  Cross citing – only 15%

・Liberals cited conservatives 247 times.

・Conservatives cited liberals 312 times.

 Notable fact: Total number of posts for conservatives was 16% fewer than liberals, and they made 40% more links.

The Figures below describe the links that were made between the top 40 liberal and conservative blogs.

The left one is the connection between the conservative and the liberal network that has 278 links within their network. The middle one is the connection of blogs where at least 5 citations were linked.

The right one is the connection of the blogs where at least 25 citations were linked, where there was almost no interaction between liberal and conservative.

The researchers concluded “In our study we witnessed a divided blogosphere, liberals and conservatives linking primarily within their separate communities, with far fewer cross-links exchanged between them.”

The question is – Is political blogosphere really  productive?

To select 40 blogs used in this research, the researcher interviewed editors, reporters and publishers to name the top 3 blogs they were constantly checking. Interestingly, their choices consistently overlapped. 10 of the most popular political blogs appeared on their top 3 lists repeatedly. That means that the world of political blogs is disproportionately dominated by a small number of blogs.  Power law theory can be applied to the blog world.

My guess is that a huge number of insignificant blogs that make up the tail of this graph are making subsets with the few famous, distinguished blogs at the core. Then those small subsets form medium sized subsets by linking and citing each other. Finally, entire political communities, both liberal and conservative are formed and create a huge bipolar shape.

The problem is, there are only a few interactions between both sides. Aside from a few exceptions, most political blogs seems to be tracking back contents with the same point of view as the bloggers, or citing articles from newspapers that favor the bloggers political orientation just to support them. Or they cite the opposite opinions and then criticize them. In both case, this only emphasize “the echo chamber effect’, and there is no space for productive discussion.  

The term “media echo chamber” can refer to any situation in which information, ideas or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission inside an “enclosed” space. Observers of journalism in the mass media describe an echo chamber effect in media discourse. One purveyor of information will make a claim, which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true. (Wikipedia)

In the conventional media, such as the TV news and newspapers, we have many chances to be exposed to a variety of opinions. But when it comes to blogs, people are less likely to check blogs that are opposed to their opinion. They tend to join the people who share the same attitudes and philosophy. At least I can say that about myself. The echo chamber effect simply puts more distance between both sides of thought. Overall, as far as politics goes, blogospheres inhibit active discussion on both sides.

Those facts leave no doubt that the political blogosphere, as well as some social network services such as MySpace and Face book, clearly are polarized into liberal and conservative factions, and there is almost no interaction with each other. Also, we can be fairly certain that the so called “echo chamber effect’ is occurring on both sides which leads to the polarization and to a vicious circle.

That said, echo the chamber effect can be a great engine for supporting and advocating political candidates. From Howard Dean to Barack Obama, we have witnessed its reinforcing power for unified cooperation

In conclusion, it is possible to build a couple of hypothesis.

1, Political blogospheres, as well as some SNS, have a great power for advocacy for political activities due to the echo chamber effect.

2, However, it includes the tendency to aggravate polarization and inhibits the occasion for direct, active discussion between liberals and conservatives.

Overall, although today’s cyber communication technologies expedite our communication ability drastically, they have also caused fractionated that harms the totality of the society.