Law in the Internet Society

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SamuelRothFirstEssay 5 - 14 Jan 2015 - Main.SamuelRoth
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 To those users, perhaps. But to measure success by popularity, and then to conclude that the most popular non-functional goods are the most successful, is to state a tautology. Some producers of non-functional goods will always seek attention for its own sake or in service of some other commercial end, at least for so long as there are unfree means of distribution that will facilitate their need to amass and tally attention like nickels and dimes.
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<		The key, however, is that accumulating attention is a consequence of producing and distributing a successful non-functional good, not a prerequisite for getting that good produced and distributed in the first place. Twitter profits by enlisting its users as attention-seekers; it then sells the opportunity to advertise to the hundreds of millions of followers whose attention its users have cultivated. In that regard, it is not unlike a television network that broadcasts its content for free in the hope that its viewers will stick around for the commercial break. But the Internet has wrought a twofold change:
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>		The key, however, is that accumulating attention is a consequence of producing and distributing a successful non-functional good, not a prerequisite for getting that good produced and distributed in the first place. Twitter profits by enlisting its users as attention-seekers; it then sells the opportunity to advertise to the hundreds of millions of followers whose attention its users have cultivated. In that regard, it is not unlike a television network that broadcasts its content for free in the hope that its viewers will stick around for the commercial break. But the Internet has wrought a twofold change:
 First, Twitter is not the only platform on which to operate a microblog; it competes with free means of distribution. If one does not care about followers or retweets, replicating the distribution function of Twitter is as simple as posting a text file to a server.

Revision 5r5 - 14 Jan 2015 - 17:15:47 - SamuelRoth
Revision 4r4 - 14 Jan 2015 - 08:26:24 - SamuelRoth
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