English subtitles for clip: File:Aaron Swartz - The Network Transformation.webm

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The change in the architecture of the media is completely connected to a change in the architecture of control

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With the broadcast system you have one person in one station

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deciding what gets put out over the airwaves. 

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When you have a distributed network like the internet everybody can be a server.

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There's no distinction between the broadcaster and the receiver:

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every computer does both.

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You can take your home laptop and run a server off of it that can distribute movies and music

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and webpages and email in the same way that the biggest computers at Google can.

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There's no fundamental difference between the computers they have in the racks in their server rooms

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and what you have on your desk.

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In the old system of broadcasting, 

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you were fundamentally limited by the amount of space in the airwaves

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You could only send out 10 channels over the airwaves in television

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or even with cable you had 500 channels.

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On the internet, everybody can have a channel; 

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everyone can get a blog or a MySpace page;

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everyone has a way of expressing themselves

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and so what you see now is not a question of

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who gets access to the airwaves, 

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it's a question of who gets control

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over the ways you find people.

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You start seeing power centralising in sites like Google,

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these sort of 'gatekeepers' that tell you where on the internet you want to go

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the people who provide you your sources of news and information.

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So its not only certain people have a license to speak

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now everyone has a license to speak,

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it's a question of who gets heard.

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So one of the biggest questions we're facing in a world of many speakers

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how do you find what's good?

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Are we gonna go to a system like the old media where you go to CNN

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and they pick a handful of people to focus on 

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and you read what they say

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or are we going to go with something more like the internet

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where everybody has a chance of being heard, a more democratic system. 

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One of the most interesting technologies for doing something like that

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is a system called collaborative filtering,

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where everybody expresses their opinions on what they like and what they don't like

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and the computer tries to match you up with other people who have similar preferences

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and recommend you things that they also like that you didn't know about before.

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It's the same kind of system you see on Amazon

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where people who bought this book also bought this book.

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People are trying to experiment that not only with books 

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but with blogs, web pages and news stories all across the internet,

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they're trying to find ways and things that you never would have heard of before 

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and bringing them in front of you.

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Mass media had this fundamental paradox

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because it was aiming at a huge audience 

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but it wanted to convince everybody they were an individual

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so you see all these ads on television all the time like

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'buck the trend, buy these jeans' right?

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And it's on a show that 4 million people are watching,

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you're not going to buck a trend by doing what 4 million other people are. 

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Now that the internet is actually making these niche things possible

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the mass media is incredibly threatened

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no longer this idea of bucking the crowd and being your own

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it's no longer just a theory you can actually do it on the internet

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And what we're starting to see is tools that take power away from the big conglomerates 

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and start to distribute it to small groups.

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And so there are a bunch of issues in a system like that there are questions of funding you know,

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how will these small groups get paid and how will the random blogger be able to live

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in a way that an investigative journalist can now

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because there's one giant source of advertising.

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You know there are question finding people, how will I be able to find the stuff I'm interested in,

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and the stuff that's trustworthy and reliable

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and so for each of these there are new technologies

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people are trying all sorts of different things

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and one of the most exciting things about the internet is that

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there is still experimentation in this, since everybody can just go up and start a website

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with a new piece of technology to try and solve one of these problems.

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We're seeing lots of different possibilities, lots of different funding models

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lots of different recommendations systems and who knows what will work best.

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We have a chance to try it all and see what falls out.

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So there are a couple of interesting funding models:

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One of course is the sort of standard method of advertising,

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you go to a bunch of big corporate sponsors and instead of having them fund a television show

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you have them fund your webpage.

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But a more interesting one is you do the same thing with niche groups

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instead of going to IBM/Ford or some big company and having them buy a banner out on your site, 

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you go to people who actually care about the readers you have.

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If you're a design weblog you go to design companies.

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If you're a politics webblog, you go to other politicians.

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You have a very targeted narrow group of people who are really interested in the subject,

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thats an audience advertisers really love.

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Another possibility is to turn directly to your readers for support.

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So you see blogs say, I wanna go on a trip to New Hampshire 

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to cover the American political conventions.

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Will you support me?

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And the readers pour in money.

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These people are very dedicated if they feel like they have a personal connection

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with the person writing,

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so they are eager to spend money to support it! 

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Another thing is that you work simply off of volunteer labor,

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you have people who have a day job that's an expert on a subject

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and they just enjoy talking about it so they rate stuff in their free time

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and publish it on the internet.

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Or they have readers who read their site and contribute stuff

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and it gets compiled into one exciting source.

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So I think there are lots of different experiments

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and people are trying in lots of different ways.

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That's one of the errors you had with television, right, was that television could only provide one level of interest.

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It was funded based on adertising, not on how much people cared about the program.

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Advertisers were going to pay the same no matter how exciting or how compelling 

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or how interested an audience was in the show

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so what you ended up with was fairly boring shows that appealed to lots of people

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because that's what advertisers wanted

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they wanted lots people watching the shows.

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Whereas in a normal market economy what happens is

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if you really want something you pay more for it

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you just can't do that with television. 

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So one of the interesting things about broadcast is that a lot of what you like 

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depends on what other people like

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there are only so many shows out there

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they are all kind of bland

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so what happens, you have these megahits

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like American Idol or Lost, where everybody at the water cooler is talking about this show,

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so you have to watch it because otherwise you can't keep up with them.

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Whenever social factors get involved

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you have this sort of process of rich gets richer

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one thing takes off because thats what everybody else is doing!

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One nice thing about the internet is that it allows for so much more variety

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that niche products can get so much more attention and interest

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So they've the run the numbers and there is this proven mathematical fact

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that as long as some percentage of what you care about is whether other people

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like it or now you're gonna end up with these patterns of hits and failures.

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If you have two things which are equivalent in quality,

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and one of them is liked by one more person than the other one,

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you're going to go that one.

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There's some small chance that you're going to go to that one 

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and everybody's going to start going to that one

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and all of a sudden you have Harry Potter.

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This one book plucked of nowhere that suddenly becomes this humongous mega-hit.

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not because it's a hundred million times better written than every other book

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but simply because everybody's reading it.

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And putting stuff on the internet doesn't change that,

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you still care about what your friends like, you still wanna read what everybody else is talking about,

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you still wanna do what's popular because you think maybe other people have a valid opinion

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and maybe you wanna talk to them about it, maybe you want to join part of this community.

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But whatever your reason is, as long as you care about other people's opinions 

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you're going to end up with these hits. 

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You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about.

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You just have this social signifier that everybody cares about.

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Everybody's watching American Idol doesn't matter how good the show is.

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I mean it has to be somewhat decent so people watch it, but once everybody's watching it,

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and everybody's talking about it, you know, it suddenly becomes this megahit for no real reason,

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right, just because it's a social phenomenon.

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And what television does, it chops off the tail and it throws away all the other shows 

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people would like but don't care enough about to be megahits

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and instead pours all of its money into these cheap-to-produce shows.

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Well you can't get rid of hits, right,

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it's a fact that people would want to do what their friends are doing

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you can't avoid that but what you can do is say there's the whole rest of the world out there

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there's a whole rest of what people care about other than what everybody else is doing.

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Everybody has their own particular interests, everybody has something that fascinates them

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and what the internet does is it allows them to do that,

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to get involved and find other people who share these things.

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One of the exciting things about Wikipedia is that it doesn't just have articles on

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you know, 100 most popular things or 1000 most popular things

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you can pick the most obscure subject in the world and there's an article about it.

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Because for EVERYTHING, there's someone who cares a great deal about it

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and that's what television, that's what radio doesn't provide, but the internet does!

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It provides a way for you to get in touch with those other people who really  

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care about this completely obscure thing.

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It doesn't just go into the direction of topic, it goes into the direction of time.

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You can go back in time and find all the shows that have been canceled,

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find all the articles that have been deleted,

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you can go back and find everything that has been lost in major culture

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and it's got a place on the internet,

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YouTube music videos from the 70s and the 80s that you can't find anywhere these days

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you can watch at your leisure.

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I think lessening the power of the hits

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bringing down the things from the top and making it more egalitarian

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is the something we should always strive for

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it may be really difficult, it may not be super possible

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but it's something to hope for, to drive for

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and what that means is 

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throwing away as much as possible, all the things that give you hints about

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you should do this because other people like it.

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It's very tempting when you're building a website or programming system

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is to start sorting things that are really popular at the top

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but all that does is, that it makes it less democratic and less fair.

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You have to have continual pressure, to try and pull things from the bottom of the tail up,

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give everybody a chance to look at everything and if you do that,

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maybe you won't get completely rid of hits, 

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but you can start to ameliorate some of their problems.

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I mean that's one power of data mining is that construct to find obscure subjects

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that you wouldn't have found simply because they are not popular.

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You know, one of the tools of recommendations

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can be to pull you to the less popular stuff down on the tail.

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The random article button on Wikipedia is really cool in this sense:

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You can just wake up every day and read about some completely random topic

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that you'd never would have heard of except for the fact that there's an article on Wikipedia about it,

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and boy are there some completely random topics! (interviewer laughs)