The Participatory Turn
in Social Life Online
Trebor Scholz
Department of Media Study
trebor@thing.net
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0
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•part 1
Who Cares? The Social Web in Numbers
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“Web 2.0” was the most externally linked to Wikipedia entry in 2006
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=709391&sourceType=1
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Qualitative and Quantitative Turn
Basic tools which are radically decentralized
Email, wiki, mailing list, blogs, web pages,
the writable web, large scale content production
environments, SMS
“See for yourself” culture
Generative Internet
Wealth of Networks
(WoN) p 14
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Participation
The participatory segment of Web 2.0 as a
percentage of all users on the web increased
from 2% in 2005 to 12% in 2007, resulting in a
growth of 668%
But a tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-
sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload
video for others to watch, according to a study of
online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with
Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.
http://tinyurl.com/27fvsb
http://tinyurl.com/24997v
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News from WSJ is that Microsoft is
looking to take a 5% stake in
Facebook for an investment rumored
to be between $300-500 million. That
would place Facebook's between $6-10
billion.
42 million active users worldwide
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/17854
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The top 10 social networking sites attract
nearly half of all Web users
(May 2006)
MySpace
Blogger
Classmates
YouTube
Yahoo!Groups
Xanga
http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/187202833
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Asian and Latin American Internet users are on the
increase while the percentage of overall North American
net users is on the decline.
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Markets are conversations?
Community as commodity.
Amazon $10.71M (06)
Netflix $688M (06)
MySpace $ 1b (07)
image source: Alexander Osterwalder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com
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Recent studies by the Pew Internet and
American Life Project have shown that 73% of all
Americans identify themselves as Internet
users.
51 million (57% of all American teenagers) are
involved in online content production.
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85% of students in supported colleges have a
profile up on FaceBook
93% log in at least once a month
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/09/07/85-of-college-students-use-facebook/
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Who uses sns?
More than half (55%) of all of online American
youths ages 12-17 use online social networking
sites, according to a new national survey of
teenagers conducted by the Pew Internet &
American Life Project.
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/134/press_release.asp
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91 percent of all \"social networking\" teens say
they use the sites to stay in touch with friends
they see frequently, such as friends from
school.
Of those surveyed, 82 percent use the sites to
stay in touch with friends they rarely see in
person.
(Jan 2007)
http://tinyurl.com/yu9ahr
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Some 55% of online teens have profiles and
most of them restrict access to their profile in
some way. Of those with profiles, 66% say their
profile is not visible to all internet users.
http://www.pewinternet.org/press_release.asp?r=139
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Gender
Among 25- to 34-year-olds, women now
spend more time using the internet than men
Wikipedia (52% of all visitors are male)
Youtube (51% of visitors are male)
(April 2007)
http://tinyurl.com/3a2rqq
http://tinyurl.com/24997v
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source:
David White 03/16/07
http://tinyurl.com/2jppad
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David White
03/16/07
source:
http://tinyurl.com/2jppad
http://tinyurl.com/2lv9vw
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Blogs are viewed as “personal journals” by many
37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as the
primary topic of their blog
There is a misconception about blogs in mainstream
media: only 11% of bloggers say they focus mainly
on government or politics.
SOURCE: PEW INSTITUTE 2006
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Usage
84% post messages to a friend’s profile
82% use internal messaging/email system of the
social network site
61% use the “bulletin” feature to send message out to
all “friends”
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Superstar sites
http://www.instapundit.com/
http://boingboing.net
http://slashdot.org/
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Language
Leading blogging language in the world now
is Japanese (37%) followed by English (33%)
and Chinese (8%)
http://tinyurl.com/24997v
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Relationship Revolution
Cooperation becomes central
(social practice of production,
exchange information, knowledge, culture)
Rise of large-scale cooperative efforts
Yochai Benkler WoN p5
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- end -
please direct comments, additions, etc
to trebor@thing.net
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