Right now I'm reading Linked: The New Science of Social Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. It's cracking good stuff. Reminds me of some of the things I was writing in my little handmade journal this past spring, thinking about how people's media/news/information network informs their political awareness and general personhood. One thing the book has not addressed in all it's talk of egalitarianism and so forth is reciprocity in linkage. That is to say, in reality, all links are not equal: some are one-way streets, others are bi-directional. In most human relationships, it's a balance between the two. A real solid scientific analysis of interpersonal links would have to view them as vectors, but I'd settle for something that could take into account binary (one-way/two-way) directionality.

A few examples; someone who works a room, gladhanding with a message can make contact with 100 people. But that will be 100 one-way links unless this person happens to actually absorb something from someone else in the process of all the palm-pressing. The likelyhood that this person actually absorbs as much as they put out from all 100 of the people in the room is close to nil. Consumers purchasing the same products are all on the recieving end of a link. Web sites linking to internet "hubs" like Yahoo or Amazon are on the giving end. Thinking politically, it's not hard to see how television news and talk radio are largely uni-directional links; the proportion of viewers watching the show to viewer emails displayed on Wolf Blitzer must run into the 5th order of magnitude.

It would seem that egalitarianism and democracy in networks is contingent on some critical mass of bi-directional linkage. For all these reasons and more, I like our chances with the net. It's becoming more diverse and hard to define out here, in spite of all the commercial encroachment. Participation is on the rise. While there are still "hubs" and "connectors" and mega-popular power-law sites, there's also a lot of actual community forming out here as well; dense and lively clusters of voices which both individually and collectively represent a vibrant society.