(Originally published in Greater Democracy).

Back in August, I wrote about Political Network Topologies, drawing a distinction between two models of politics, one in terms of social networks and the other in terms of citizens as consumers. Jock added a comment pointing me to the work of Anna Nagurney from Umass on supernetworks.

I listened her keynote at MeshForum 2005 and started thinking in different ways about networks. Usually, when I think about networks, I think about nodes and links. However, she points out the importance of the flow on the network as well.

Yesterday, Grant McCracken wrote about brands as a new content provider. He focuses on the ‘flow’ aspects of social networks and how this flow is essential to sustaining social networks. He goes on to suggest that brands may be an important source of ‘flow’ for social networks, thus bringing together ideas of politics as a social network and politics as a group of citizens as consumers.

Looking at grassroots political groups I’ve been involved with, this makes a lot of sense. There is an ebb and flow of political involvement based on the flow on the political social networks. Various groups, like the DNC, DFA, Move On, etc. have been providing a brand and content to try and keep people excited and involved.

However, this brings us back to the whole issue of network topology. The problem with brands providing content is that the network flow comes too much from a small number of sources and the flow is unidirectional. If we want to keep a social network vibrant, we need to encourage the leaf nodes to produce content and the flow to be multidirectional.

Can brands to that? Can blogs do that? It is useful to think about network flow, but we need to be careful about getting stuck in old broadcast style thinking that doesn’t utilize network flow as fully as possible.