2008 March | pureinformation.org

Recently, New York University Professor Clay Shirky gave an amazing talk at the Harvard Berkman Center about his new book, “Here Comes Everybody.” In his talk, Shirky says, “the Internet isn’t a decoration on contemporary society, it’s a challenge to it.” He claims that the Internet in action represents an important technological marker in our society such that the world pre-Internet looks very different from the world post-Internet. Clay says, “a society with the Internet is a different type of society, just like a a society with a printing press was fundamentally a different type of society.” We’ve seen this before, but with really only a few things: printing press, telegraph/telephone, recorded media, and broadcast.

Clay observes that the aforementioned media were revolutionary but limiting–technologies that create groups don’t create two-way communications, and technologies that create two-way communications don’t create groups. For the former, he uses an example of a magazine. Magazine publishing can foster a large group of followers, but doesn’t facilitate fans communicating with each other or fans communicating with the magazine staff (at least very well). For the latter, Shirky uses the example of the telephone. Telephones create easy two-way communication channels, but don’t really build groups around it.

We now realize that with the Internet, we have a network that is natively good at group forming. As Shirky asserts, “group action just got easier.” Before the Internet, Clay says, groups get complicated before they get large. He offers a classic diagram that displays the ballooning number of node connections as node size increases (5 people, 10 connections; 10 people, 45 connections). We realize that there are native disabilities to large groups, but today sociologists point out that the Internet provides for “ridiculously easy group forming.”

Clay offers the “reply-all” email feature as one of the first examples of ridiculously easy group forming. But we also see a social lag in acceptance and adoption of these types of technologies. Groups are natively conservative, and in the “reply-all” instance, all members need to be participating for the technology to really spread its wings.

Shirky compares the Internet today to the example of an internal combustion engine. We don’t think about the car engine when we drive to the grocery store, but the engine is crucial for the event to take place. The same thing happens with the Internet now. Clay says, “once the technology has sunk deep enough into the culture the social effects that get built on it require the technology and aren’t about the technology.

Clay then breaks down group development online into 4 different categories: sharing, conversation, collaboration, and collective action. Sharing is demonstrated through social networking sites like del.icio.us, where social effects are almost an afterthought. In this “me first” collaboration world, users discover others they have things in common with only after they’ve done their own work. Conversation can be represented through the development of communities of practice, such as the HDR photography groups on Flickr. Shirky says that the group took a mere 3 months to explode, and that through conversation and posting of tips about HDR, the group can get better together. Furthermore, additional value is created by introducing users to one another. Collaboration occurs in such groups like anime translating and dubbing. Clay observes that this group started writing software to subtitle the anime they liked because those titles were otherwise unavailable. This process required teamwork, and there was no obvious commercial motivation behind it–fans just wanted to increase the overall accessibility of anime. Collective action is the future of the Internet, Shirky says, but we are getting a taste of its potential today. He explains an example of collective petitioning to enact an air passenger bill of rights after travelers were stranded on a Detroit tarmac for 7+ hours. While the social support required to sustain this type of action is high, we see that citizens are using new communication tools to co-opt traditional media for collaboration and synchronizing once-disparate groups for action. Now, the Internet can help people achieve a shared goal, and not just provide information.

Fascinating stuff. Once again thanks to Berkman Center for inviting such interesting thinkers and for providing the podcasts/webcasts so quickly! Check out Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” blog. Video at MediaBerkman.

Recently, Slate ran an article titled “The Wisdon of the Chaperones: Digg, Wikipedia, and the myth of Web 2.0 democracy.” The gist of Chris Wilson’s article reveals that user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia and Digg, touted as democratic entities of collaborative knowledge production, are not really democratic at all. Wilson writes:

Social-media sites are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show.

He may be right, but this is nothing new. And are we surprised? Online communities will initially reflect traditional communities. We shouldn’t think that a dash of web 2.0 will automatically change the way knowledge communities have been constructed and maintained for hundreds of years. But we should recognize that this process is changing–sites like Wikipedia are empowering thousands of new users every week, no matter how much the community still seems to be comprised of a few influential contributors. This is also changing, and will continue to change as Wikipedia grows. New users will be able to contribute, while the big guys can stick around. Maybe this is not so much a revolution as it is a non-rivalrous (and potentially mutually beneficial) inclusive environment.

Wilson’s claims about Wikipedia’s governance and maintenance structure suggests an unregulated free-for-all few would support. He writes:

[Wikipedia] deploys bots—supervised by a special caste of devoted users—that help standardize format, prevent vandalism, and root out folks who flood the site with obscenities. This is not the wisdom of the crowd. This is the wisdom of the chaperones.

Is this so unreasonable? Do we really object if vandals and spam are banished?

Wilson references an article titled “Power of the Few vs. Wisdom of the Crowd: Wikipedia and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie,” but fails to accurately represent its conclusions. Sure, 1 percent of Wikipedia users may be responsible for about half of the site’s edits, but as Aaron Swartz points out, content–not number of edits, is what we need to be looking at. Even the authors admit, “by counting each edit instead of the length of each edit, we effectively treat, say, the deletion of a comma as equivalent to the addition of three paragraphs of text.”

If we look at the amount of content changed and not the running edit count, we see a different story. Swartz’s calculations show that the majority of Wikipedia’s content is created by outsiders (those with few edits) while the majority of the cleanup and tweaking is made by insiders (those with lots of edits):

An outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

Wilson continues to discuss the Palo Alto research article:

People who’ve made more than 10,000 edits add nearly twice as many words to Wikipedia as they delete. By contrast, those who’ve made fewer than 100 edits are the only group that deletes more words than it adds. A small number of people are writing the articles, it seems, while less-frequent users are given the tasks of error correction and typo fixing.

I will argue that no one “gives” anyone anything to do on Wikipedia. Furthermore, the reason many less-frequent users may begin with error correction and typo fixing is exactly because they are beginners. Like in any community, newbies progress through a similar process in learning the norms and rules of contributing before becoming an expert.

The aforementioned research paper sums up the changing nature of Wikipedia and contradicts Wilson’s flawed analysis concerning the undemocratic nature of user-generated content sites like Wikipedia and Digg:

We discovered an initial rise and subsequent decline in the influence of “elite” users. This result held true whether elite users were defined by peer-selected groups (administrators) or data-driven groups (high-edit users). We demonstrated that this decline was not due to a decrease in elite user activity or to shifts in user group editing patterns, but instead was driven by marked growth in the population of low-edit users — the rise of the bourgeoisie.

The barriers to participation are low on user-generated content sites like Wikipedia. If we are to fully realize what scholars see as new media’s “participatory revolution” (where traditional consumers of knowledge have become the producers of it) we need to continue support the engagement and education of new users on democratic sites Wikipedia.