Small China

We have all heard the news that do-no-evil Google has accepted to comply with Chinese laws and ban some words from the search results (Google testimony here). More than that China is censoring media, editors, journalist, blogs, and practically any form of free expression. According to this article this censorship is not having the desired effect from the government. The only reason they give is that there are simply too many blogs.

Well, I have a different idea, I think that censorship is not useless as a strategy for China’s government. It is counterproductive. It is making the the chinese blogsphere stronger. Let me explain why do I think it is so.

Bloggers inbound link generate a power law. So we have few important blogs, but also a long thick tail of blogs that have few inbound link, and form a sort of sub ecology that sustain the blogsphere itself. The blogsphere is not so much given by the 100 blogs in the A-list, but by the remianing 100.000. Blogs are linked between us in a particular network which is known as a small world. Small world are quite ubiquitouse, and have been discovered in the last decades, and studied quite a lot. Well small world come in two varieties:

1. Hierarchical networks, those networks tend to follow a power law in the number of links. They have few prominent figures, that tend to dominate the general behaviour.
2. Non hierarchical networks. Here the number of inbound links does NOT follow a power law and still the network is a small world, with many nodes, nodes generally connected locally, but with some long distance connections that make information spread through the system fast.

And then you have system in between, and system who start off as system of one kind, then tend to evolve as a system of a second kind. And example of this was the network of airports. At the beginning airoports tended to follow a power law in terms of importance (number of flights per year). But eventually the biggest airports (think Heathrow) could not grow any longer, and it started to be less expensive to have new flights reach less known airports, who in this way started to grow. The airport network kept being a small world, just the distribution changed. (I am not sure if it just did not follow a power law anymore for some parts of the data, or followed a different power law, with a less steep exponent)

Let’s get back to China.
Well, what the censors in China has doing is suppressing the blogs, in order of popularity. And what other choice would they have? of course you start with the big fish. But the effect of this is not to destroy the network, but to feed it. And make it more decentralised. If the people cannot find the information they were looking for in the A-list, they will keep on searching, google is not the only way. Word-of-blog is way more productive in this context. Eventually they will find this information. Generally in the B-list and the B-list will grow. Yes, the big fish of the B-list will still succumb, but for each of them that dies, all its inbound link will be taken and redistributed. And every time a blog is discovered its original material will be seen by more people, and even more people will start link to this new blog. In short the internal linking structure of the blogsphere will get stronger, the long thicker, able to contain and discuss more ideas, and will be more decentralised. And the more it is decentralised, ther harder it is to control it. In short:
Nothing feeds the blogsphere, like a good-ol’ censorship.

Related posts:

1. No more Ivory Towers I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are [...]...
2. My new homepage Recently I have made some serious changes to my homepage. SOme of those changes I have been planning from a long long time. Others were more sudden. The central page is of course at pietrosperoni.it that leads to home.pietrosperoni.it. But then there was something that I wanted to do for a long time. Integrate my [...]...