P2P Foundation

We asked Jonas Andersen, whom we met at Copenhagen’s Advice University to provide us with a summary of his Master’s Thesis on ‘Complex Communication Networks’

Common platform, common goal

My approach to p2p dynamics is through communications and medium theory. This result in two levels of interest: 1) The physical level of media and distribution of information, and 2) the social level of human communication. Following, network communication is organized around a common platform, and a common goal.

Communication reduces the complexity of network media

In distributed media the medium is not the message. Not anymore. Media do not reduce the complexity of communication by setting up constraints for the way we act and communicate. On the contrary, communication and social action reduces complexity and constrain our use of media as tools of interaction. So communication is the medium for media, and social action reduces the complexity of our use of media.

P2P Network media brings communication home

With digital network media communication has ‘come home’ in the sense that communication as globally scaled synchronous interaction can organize social processes such as politics, business, science etc.

Distributed media have been around for the better part of a decade. The platform has been common. With the global scaling of self-organizing social interaction systems, a common goal is shared in a specialized community of practice much like the orally mediated communities of pre-feudal societies. Communication has come home in the shape of network distributed, digitally mediated self-organizing communities.

Network organization beats the complexity challenge

From the introduction of writing in ancient societies with the coming of the feudal organization, over Gutenberg’s printing press with the coming of industrialism information overload has been a crucial driver for organizational change. When the current mode of organization cannot cope with enough complexity, a new organizational paradigm emerges. With the internet sustaining an exponentially growing complexity of information the organizational principles of modernity must be supplemented by distributed, self-organizing systems capable of reducing the complexity of a connected world.