The Digg Factor: The Digg Phenomenon and a Possible Elementary Model of the Core Processes of Digg
Today’s subject is the social information flow. I had expressed a few ideas in a previous article called Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society. A recent article I found steered my thoughts for once again so I felt compelled to return to this subject.
The article is this one The Digg Effect – ReadWriteWeb.
The article starts by describing how Digg works. It then describes its position in the news ecosystem.
News that originates at media companies and in the blogosphere follows along a few paths. First, raw news come to aggregators like Bloglines, Google Reader and Netvibes. Another flow is to the automatic popularity sites like Techmeme. Unlike Digg, Techmeme is powered by an algorithm and computes popularity of stories based on the number of sources talking about it and linking to each other. The third pass is through Digg, which is a human-powered news filter. The best stories that people find are bookmarked and stored permanently on sites like del.icio.us.
Then it goes on to describe two concepts that we’ll analyze in this article.
1) Digg is a man-made, self-organizing, complex system
2) Digg is a filter which sifts a lot of the the signal from the noise of the web.
However, we need to add a specification to these two concepts, that lies at the core of this analysis. By all accounts, Digg is an informational system. So we should restate the first two concepts concluding that
Digg is a man-made, self-organizing, complex, informational system that filters out noise from the signal.
The author of the original article probably thought that the informational character of Digg is self-evident. However, we had to give the definition above in order to drive our model forward. Information is the core of the whole process we’re trying to analyze. By specifying this, we immediately raise a new subject.
Since we’re talking about informational proccesses, we’re talking about humans. The mechanism that analyzes information is the human cognitive system. By stating this, our analysis can stay at this level and doesn’t have to proceed to a lower level, through the reductionism paradigm, thus simplifying our job.
However, after that statement we have a difficult task to do. By stating that the level our analysis is the cognitive system, I made evident that I stripped out the social factor. However, Digg is a social website. However, can we consider it social for the purposes of our analysis?
A social system encompasses groups of people and analyzes their dynamics. Digg contains a group of people: its users. However, the dynamics of the community are evolved not in a pure sociological context, but in a social psychological context. The reason for that is that the user that sits behind a computer holds a much greater degree of individuality concerning the simple procedures that he can do as a Digg user (commenting on and digging articles). So, it would not be wise to study the interaction of users purely in a sociological level.
However, Digg holds also to a certain degree of sociological analysis for two reasons.
1)All the users come from certain social backgrounds
2)It shapes the informational structure of society
A few things about the second can be found in the article Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society.
So our analysis needs to be centered around these subjects
This picture shows that we have 4 factors, each one affecting the one next to it. The more steps a factor is from another, the more difficult it becomes to see a direct influence to it.
So, let’s start by stating how digg affects society
1)It provides a faster flow of information, thus conducing to meta-informational social regulation as stated in Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society. Thus, here we have the society and the social influence factor.
2)It creates a hive-mind as stated in The Monitor. The Monitor ep. 5 – Digg makes you Dumb and an AAAS Roundup [Video]. This means that the opinion of the individuals are influenced by the opinion of the group. So, here we have the social psychology and the cognitive factor.
3)It shapes the opinions of the individuals and their cognitive content. So, here we have the cognitive system factor.
The argument that The Monitor presents and was posted here The Latest News Headlines—Your Vote Counts describes a research that compared newspapers headlines with social networking sites headlines, indicating that newspapers headlines were more important, dealing with issues such as Iraq and immigration. A very good critic of this research can be found here Does Social Media Make You Dumb? where the author identifies two problems with the study: Social networking sites can handle more news, so just looking at the headlines isn’t a decisive to a conclusion and the study of social sites reveals what users are actually reading, whereas the mainstream news statistics point only at what they’re writing (where in the case of Digg for example, we know that the users have actually read the headlines).
No, not that Monitor you geeks
Now, we will discuss the structure of Digg that we derive from the definition we gave before. Digg is
1) A self-organized system. Digg starts with a few basic principles (that we will call acting rules) and organizes itself through what we will call acting units. That is, its users. The acting matter is the information found on the web.
3) A filter that filters out noise from the web information (the signal). This might seem a little strange to some, since we haven’t specified what the signal is. If the signal is web information in general, then we cannot consider anything noise, since the signal could be considered to be everything: the words used, the images in an article and the meaning conveyed (but not just this). However, in the beginning of the article we stated that by considering Digg an informational system we are talking about how us humans perceive and use information, which is through the cognitive system. So, we define information as follows
Information is the meaning that an article conveys. This includes not only the concept, but any additional views by the author(s), facts and evidence concerning any claims (whether this is statistical, anecdotal or otherwise specified).
So, to recapitulate, the creators of Digg, by giving the acting rules they created a complex system organized by the acts of the acting units, so as to filter out information, which is the the acting matter. Thus, digg manages to convey us information in a purer form, thus becoming some sort of socially driven search engine. This is something that the Google already knows, that’s why you’ll see many times searches on Google indicating articles on Digg or other social networking sites. Digg matters, since the filtering is done by human subjects.
However, Digg is dynamic in its function. The information that appears on it has points that determine the visibility of the posts. Pretty much like a propaganda machine that propagates certain news changes the opinions of the individuals (and the therefore the social informational structure), the same happens in the context of Digg. Thus, we have a new factor: the Digg Factor. This factor affects mainly the cognitive factor, influencing the others indirectly through it.
However, Digg can have its own noise. User/Submitter is a service that has a goal profit and corrupts the Digg procedure, making its goal of conveying information more difficult.
I wish I could go on with this article but I’m afraid it will get too long. We have just scrapped the surface of the social networking phenomenon. We just talked about digg and some of its core principles: A very elementary model of the way it works and a very elementary model of how it affects society and the individual. Heck, we didn’t ever cover the whole idea the news ecosystem described in which can even include blogs (like Encefalus 
) and provide a more clear view of the informational flow on the internet and how to benefit from it. And most important of all, we didn’t offer sufficient criticism, since maybe social networking is working more like an obstacle to good information, rather than a help. We will return to this subject at other articles. Until, next time try to dig into the subject.
Just dig(g) it
Further Reading:
