IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 28

commentary

Nicholas Paul Sheppard

aving recently relocated to a country
where I know very
few people, I tried
looking for a local
branch of a hobby group of which
I'd been a long-time member in my
home country. There are, as far as I
can tell, no members of the group
in the city in which I live, though the
city is nominally covered by a farflung branch servicing a smattering
of members across Asia. After several
false starts searching through outof-date web sites and emailing outof-date addresses, I managed to get
into email contact with the branch.
I was told that, in order to participate in the branch, I could join
their Facebook group. Now, I'm not
a member of Facebook, so I asked if
they could instead just send me a calendar of events (thinking I might be
able to travel to one sometime) and/
or pass on my email address to anyone they knew of in the same area as
me. I have not heard anything since.
I felt a bit like the contrarian
character, Mercer, who refuses to
join the social network in Dave
Eggers' novel The Circle [1]. Scott
Eldridge reviewed the novel in the
March 2015 issue of this Magazine
[2], but I took a quite different -
though not necessarily mutually
exclusive - message to the one
suggested in that review. For me,
the major issue was corporate
power, and the eagerness of the

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2572739
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

Social Network
Neutrality, Anyone?
novel's characters to submit to a
system created and maintained by
a private company.
Eldridge draws attention to the
"unraveling effect" described by
Scott Peppet, in which individuals
make some personal gain from
revealing private information, such
that everyone else needs to follow
in order keep up, with the result
that no one has any real choice but
to reveal their information. Social
networks might be subject an analogous effect - call it the "raveling
effect," if you like - when, as more
people join the network, those who
refuse are at a greater and greater
disadvantage and eventually have no
real choice but to join the network.
Consider my hobby group. I can
join the Facebook group, becoming a consumer of Facebook and its
advertisers, or I can remain out of
reach of others who share my hobby.
Tim Berners-Lee drew attention to the potential for social networks and other closed systems to
fragment the web into a series of
non-communicating propriety ecosystems, or to become monopoly
providers like The Circle, in a 2010
Scientific American article:
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

Some of [the Web's] most
successful inhabitants have
begun to chip away at its
principles. Large social networking sites are walling off
information posted by their
users from the rest of the
Web [3, p. 80].
In another part of the article, Berners-Lee expresses concern about
Internet service providers favoring
one kind of traffic over another. "Net
neutrality" has since become a familiar catch-cry, but his fear in the quote
above seems to have been largely
overlooked or forgotten.
Take what happens when I catch
up from news from home via the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
("ABC"). The ABC is a public broadcaster, and prohibited from showing advertisements by the Act under
which it operates. Yet sometimes
it seems that announcers hardly
go a talk break, or a web site one
screen, without inviting the audience
to jump on Facebook, or Twitter, or
(most recently) WhatsApp. Somehow
promoting or offering the services
(continued on page 45)

∕

june 2016

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