An Bui, Spelled An With 1 N

This post is the first in a series of my interpretation of Social Media Principles. More to come in the near distant future.

From my 10 Principles of Social Media. The Remix:

Freedom enables us to pursue our thoughts and interests in a social space. Thus decentralization is of primary value.

This formulation of freedom recognizes that freedom is necessary for individuals to pursue their values. Constraints limit one’s ability to pursue values. Some constraints are part of reality, such as Newton’s Laws of Physics. Other constraints can be attributed to circumstances or context. In the context of this post, centralization and the degree of is one such circumstantial constraint.

Thinking about centralization in terms of network, connection, and nodes, the fewer number of nodes in a network, the more centralized the network. These few nodes serve as the conduit of information and power. Should something happen to one of the nodes, the power dynamic and balance of the system would shift, if not outright splinter. The other nodes would bear more responsibility and there would be fewer pathways to information. With more barriers to information, the greater the challenge of obtaining information and the greater the possibility of an ill-informed decision.

In a decentralized system, more connections means less reliance on any one node for information. Redundancies protect against information loss should any node be removed from the system as well as provide options for information sources. Thus, one is free to choose which node, connection, pathway will serve as the information source and validate that information against other resources in the system.

Decentralization Leads to Social Freedom

This lack of dependence also provides social freedom. The less one depends on any given node, the more freedom one has to exercise any one of the greater number of options.

For example, take a group of three friends. If this group had no other friends, the personal relationships between them all are of high importance and each individual would need to provide the social resources and interactions the other two need. Should one go away, that impact will be felt - mathematically, there is a 50% decrease in friend choices for those remaining. Considering others’ reactions may have greater importance in decision making, given social consequences of public action.

Take a group of 30 friends. Any given individual now has 29 friendships. If one-third of of this group leaves this system, each of those remaining now have 19 friendships. I solved the first example, I’ll leave this one as an exercise for the readers.

What does this all mean?

Decentralization = Freedom due to lower barriers to information access and risk spreading in social relationships, thus creating a virtuous cycle that more freedom –> more decentralized network –> more freedom… and I look forward to your thoughts/questions/remixes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 1:14 am and is filed under social media principles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.