The Participatory Turn
in Social Life Online
Trebor Scholz
Department of Media Study
trebor@thing.net
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0
1

•part 2
The Ineptitude and Affordances of the Crowd
2

The networked public sphere enables anyone to
go through her practical life observing the social
environment through new eyes -- the eyes of
someone who could inject a thought, a criticism, a
concern into public debate.
Empowerment
p 11
3

Milieus of Influence
Blogs
LiveJournal, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress
Wikis
JotSpot (Google), Wikispaces
Tagging & Social Bookmarks
del.ico.us
del.icio.us
Social Filtering
Digg, Reddit, StumbledUpon
XML Syndication (e.g., RSS)
Bloglines, Technorati
Social Networks
Facebook, Twitter, Xing
4

Peer production
Immersive entertainment
Encyclopedias
News & commentary
Production used to be constrained to large
(physical) capital (i.e. steel production)
(WoN) p 5
5

CI & the Blogosphere
Comments
Tags
Feeds
Feeds Bookmarks
Blogs
6

CI & the Blogosphere
Comments
Tags
Feeds
Feeds Bookmarks
Blogs
6

CI & the Blogosphere
Comments
Tags
Feeds
Feeds Bookmarks
Blogs
6

8 days after a video was posted
showing how to pick the lock in
30 seconds using a pen,
Kryptonite recalled 380,000 locks
Businesses can’t stop the conversation...
so they try to harness it for your benefit
7

•Collective Intelligence
8

The full impact of such technology on collective intelligence and
political effort has yet to be felt, but the anti-globalization
movement relies heavily on e-mail, cell phones, pagers, SMS, and
other means of organizing before, during, and after events.
illustration edited by TS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence
9

Collective intelligence is the capacity of
human communities to evolve towards higher
order complexity and harmony, through such
innovation mechanisms as differentiation and
integration, competition and collaboration.
http://tinyurl.com/2gk6jv
10

Google uses the knowledge
millions of people have
stored in the World Wide
Web to provide remarkably
useful answers to users'
questions
http://cci.mit.edu/ Wikipedia motivates
thousands of volunteers
around the world to create
the world's largest
encyclopedia
11

http://tinyurl.com/yp4asq
12

When you run SETI@home on your computer, it will use part of
the computer's CPU power, disk space, and network bandwidth.
You can control how much of your resources are used by
SETI@home, and when it uses them.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/info.php
13

Collective intelligence changes
the role of expert knowledge
as sole authority
14

15

Motivations
Social connectedness
Psychological well-being
Gratification
Material gain
WoN p 6
16

EDUCATION
Opening up of Open
Educational
Mass Collaboration
Classrooms
Resources
17

http://tinyurl.com/2gk6jv
18

•Effects
19

The networked public sphere is a fact, not a fad
Reality rather than utopia
Autonomy here is not so much a philosophical
concept but an actual individual experience
WoN p 9
20

Enhanced Autonomy
1) Improves capacity to do more for and by
themselves
2) Enhances capacity to do more in loose
commonality with others (without the hierarchies
of traditional organizations)
3) Improves capacity of individuals to do more in
organizations that are outside the market sphere
WoN p 8
21

Method
When evaluating democratization we need to
compare the actualities of the networked public
sphere to the reality of commercial mass media.
Forget the idealized projections of the early and
mid-90s.
WoN p 10
22

Information overload
Filtration, relevance, and accreditation
Mutual pointing, peer review, pointing to original
sources of claim
Local clusters, peer-review-like qualities
WoN p 12/13
23

Novel Forms of Publishing and Research
From writing to a limited audience to authoring for a broad audience
24

Commercial Mass Media
What are the failures of commercial mass media
as platforms for public discourse?
25

Objections
Babel Objection
You can speak but who listens
WoN p 10
26

Individuals are less susceptible to manipulation by a class and/or
owners of mass communication media
They are more likely to author their own lives, perhaps perceive
a broader range of possibilities
Influence of mass media decreases
27

Limits of Mass Media
Small cadre of commercial journalists
Commercial journalists are given inordinate
power to shape opinion and information
This power is for sale
28

Enhanced Individual Autonomy
Newly expanded practical freedom: to act and
cooperate to improve the experience of
democracy, justice, development, critical culture,
and community
WoN p 9
29

Critical and self-reflective practice
200 million members on Myspace
100 million blogs-- people with a writing practice
30

Cost of becoming a speaker lowered
For authoritarian countries it is harder and more
expensive to maintain control over public spheres
(China, Singapore, Vietnam)
Cost of sending an email, setting up a web page is low
31

From Copyright to Creative Commons
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0
32

The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization
devoted to expanding the range of creative work available
for others legally to build upon and share. The
organization has released several copyright licenses known
as Creative Commons licenses. These licenses, depending
on the one chosen, restrict only certain rights (or none) of
the work.
33

From taxonomy
to folksonomy
http://tinyurl.com/3bhbaa
http://tinyurl.com/2e8mvh
http://tinyurl.com/3blj62
34

Folksonomy
(also known as collaborative tagging , social classification,
social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the
practice and method of collaboratively creating and
managing tags to annotate and categorize content. In
contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is not
only generated by experts but also by creators and
consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords
are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.[1]
35

People come back to Digg.com
because of the community
36

?
As much as 28% of Americans have tagged
Pew Internet Life Project: Report on Tagging
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/201/report_display.asp
37

?
??
? 38

The Heavy Metal Umlaut, Jon Udell
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html
http://tinyurl.com/2e8mvh
39

•Crowdsourcing
40

•Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a job
traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and
outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of
people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public
may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design
task, refine an algorithm or help analyze large amounts of
data.
Below-market wages, or no wages at all.
No written contracts, non-disclosure
agreements, or employee agreements
or agreeable terms with
crowdsourced employees.
41

http://tinyurl.com/3b8f5n
42

Threadless.com
The company prints T-shirts with designs submitted
to its Web site (for free).
Expected revenue in 2007: $20 million
43

44

Lego asks inclined costumers to design new Lego sets.
44

The “Consumption” of a Service Increases Its Value
Over 1 Billion User Reviews
Over 1 Million User Reviews per Day
3.5 Million Paying Users
45

- end -
please direct comments, additions, etc
to trebor@thing.net
46

47