internetz-not as open as hoped

“The reaccuring suggestion is that the internet is a narrowcasting or poincasting medium that levels the playing field, elimiates traditional gatekeepers, and gives voice to marginalized or resource-poor groups.” But this is difficult to test. some argue that it is the smaller sites that are the most important because they are the hardest to measure. They argue that even if there is the ability to be publicized easily on the internet, other voices, other websites are much larger that other peers on the web would rely on them before a smaller voice.

the dilemma is that small sites may have a very large impact in a political campaign but would not be noticed because their traffic patterns are too difficult to measure due to its size.

Altering the way we understand the internet. In layers. First layer, hardware. Second, the coding that transfers data across the network, the code or logical layer. Last, the content layer, the actual files, documents that are shared in the network.

Hyperlinks are key to find relevent and useful information google and search engines have algorithms to simulate relevence which implements the usage of link structure. It is important to know how these search engines simulate relevance and what measures have been taken to maintain and evolve the “search layer”. The study that tsiotsiouliklis, johnson, and hindman made uses sites that focused on a variety of relevant political subjects like abortion, gay marriage, healthcare, and websites that house specific subjects show to follow a power law where a small set of websites are successful while the most sites get very little traffic. “link topology of the web suggest that the online public sphere is less open than many have hoped or feared.” So the intended openness of the internet, though the freedom to speak is available to all, the ability to be heard is much more exclusive.

According to this chapter, there is a direct relation between sites that receive most of the links and sites that receive most of the traffic. There are several ways for a user to access websites. It can be through e-mail, knowing the url, social networking. One main process of being referred to previously undiscovered sites is linking, from known sites into unknown sites, or search engines to be linked into relevant sites. The chapter says that by this process of linking, the more heavily linked sites are given more credence than those that are less linked. This helps filter out the irrelevant sites.