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Understanding Patterns of Online Discussion

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA2012 is Sora Park, whose interest is in the processes of online discussion participation, initially especially in the context of the 100 days of political protest in South Korea in 2008. Different online discussion platforms have different affordances, of course – some will list only the most recent or most popular (or most recently popular) posts, for example, thus directing users’ attention towards specific contributions.

Developing an Online Support Community for Breast Cancer

Canberra.
The first paper session at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference starts with a paper presented by Cynthia Witney, and deals with the differences between social networks and online communities. This is part of an ARC Linkage project which develops guidelines for an online community for breast cancer survivors, also sponsored by the Steel Blue boot company’s ‘purple boots’ philanthropic campaign.

Part of the aim here was also to move the campaign into a Web 2.0 space by developing a ‘purple boot brigade’ social network site; an early version of this network (based on Ning) attracted some 880 supporters. This early attempt at social networking successfully managed to spread awareness about the campaign and its cause; the site became a method for interactive social education.

Towards Open Statecraft

Berlin.
The second keynote at the Berlin Symposium this morning is by Philipp Müller, who will argue for the idea of ‘open statecraft’ in a networked world. He suggests that our world has become ‘unfiltered’ through the move from mass to networked and social media; the appropriate description for this is not simply many-to-many or few-to-few media, but n-to-n media, where all sorts of power games in pursuit of communicative impact, visibility, and success take place.

There are also some cognitive lags here – we’re missing a framework that allows each of us to work in these worlds, much as we once learnt, slowly and with difficulty, to live in the industrialised and mass media worlds. Historical analogies are 1386 – where lances as a military technology were first used to undermine warfare based on mediaeval knights, and in the process undermined the knighthood system overall; 1518, when Martin Luther became the first blogger, using the new technology of the printing press, and a church door, to initiate some 150 years of governance crisis; and 1927, when Bertolt Brecht pursued ‘radio theory’ and considered the development of audience-driven backchannels to radio as well as theatre plays.

Further Critical Questions about Crowdsourcing

Berlin.
The second speaker in this (really productive) session on crowdsourcing at the Berlin Symposium is Malte Ziewitz, whose interest is in the application of crowd wisdom to regulatory problems. Crowdsourcing itself isn’t actually all that new – there have been questions about the wisdom or folly of crowds for a very long time already, and ‘the crowd’ has been positioned as a problem (the uninformed mob) as much as as a solution (drawing on folk knowledge and commonsense).

Current thinking on crowd wisdom comes variously from management science, computer science, and economics (painting crowdsourcing as an engineering challenge, focussing on generating ‘useful’ information, and worrying about bias, abuse, and manipulation) and from political science, sociology, and regulation studies (focussing on the solicitation of lay views, concerns over knowledge gaps and expertise in regulatory decision-making, and questions of technology and regulation). These combine into a view of crowd wisdom as a techno-scientific solution to regulatory problems – through terms like ‘wiki government’, ‘infotopia’, ‘peer production’, and ‘civic technologies’.

Understanding Crowdsourcing Processes

Berlin.
The next session at the Berlin Symposium is on crowdsourcing, involving two speakers (there’s also a lot of discussion, which I’m not blogging here.) We begin with Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva, who begins by introducing the range of related concepts which describe the broad field of crowdsourcing. The Net is diminishing transactional costs for communication, collaboration and coordination; this facilitates collaboration amongst disparate stakeholders and provides more opportunities for individuals to participate. As a result, innovation has been democratised – indeed, users are becoming ever more important as innovators.

Internet-enabled innovation can be used as an umbrella term for these processes; within this field, there are a number of specific formations, however: these include lead user innovation (users taking part in the value creation process on their own account, innovating largely in offline contexts); open innovation (initiated and coordinated by companies and other organisations, both in on- and offline contexts); user innovation communities (enabled and facilitated through Internet platforms and technologies, connecting users and companies); open source communities (as a specific, user-driven form of user innovation communities); and crowdsourcing (similar to user innovation communities spreading across users and companies, and online).

Factors in the Governance of Social Media Spaces

Berlin.
Now that the Berlin Symposium is properly underway (congratulations to all concerned!), I’ve made my way into the workshop session on social media governance. The featured speaker in this session is Niva Elkin-Koren, whose research is on governance structures within social media themselves. Social media participants in the first place constitute an unorganised crowd outside of traditional organisations – from open source development outside of companies to political action outside of traditional parties, as we have seen in various countries around the world over the past twelve months. This can lead to real political change, as well as to real violence, of course, which makes it even more important to study.

Research in this area has focussed variously on collaborative content creation, crowdsourcing, organisational processes (without organisations), etc. Niva’s interest is in challenging this idea of the unorganised crowd, then: what processes of governance, including emergent self-governance, apply in these cases? Who are the players, the actors, the individual users and collective groups participating here? Term being used widely here include ‘strangers’, ‘crowd’, as well as ‘community’ – but what do we mean by these terms, and what are the differences between them?

Forms of Deviance in Online Communities

Seattle.
Well, the final day or AoIR 2011 is upon us, and I’m starting it in a panel on politics. We begin with Fa Martin-Niemi, whose interest is in knowledge-sharing in virtual spaces. Such spaces are filled with social networks, and people act differently as they participate in different social networks – sometimes deviantly to a lesser or greater extent. What are the implications for organisational knowledge spaces in this?

Extreme deviance, of course, is damaging to online social networks; there is also positive deviance, however, which can be beneficial (whistleblowing is one example – such deviance is honourable and voluntary, and oriented to greater norms than just those of the immediate social space).

Fa pursued a three-month virtual ethnographic study of online software developers’ fora; she identified different levels of participation, and different roles played by individual participants. Each level of participation had associated deviances: interpersonal deviance, for example, where people acted ‘lawfully stupid’ by grandstanding, philosophising, acting rudely, or making grandiosely absolute statements; or in-crowd enforcement, where self-appointed group guardians try to enforce perceived group norms. (And these two forms of group deviants are also often picking fights with one another.)

Coordinating Online Resources for the Wisconsin Protests

Seattle.
OK, sadly I missed part of the Wisconsin protests AoIR 2011 panel, but I’m here at least to cover Matt Gaydos’s presentation. The history of Wisconsin’s protest and activist movements is strong, and the recent grassroots movement against the virtual outlawing of unions is an important new step in this; Matt recounts the story of himself and his fellow students becoming outraged enough to be persuaded to act.

Some of the organising took place through community-organised Defend Wisconsin Websites and Twitter accounts; these were useful, but only to people who were involved right from the start – they didn’t provide enough material for latecomers to begin to understand the issues, and to learn about how they might be able to help.

Introducing a Theory of Acute Events

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 is our own, fabulous panel on crisis communication. We begin with an overview paper by my CCI colleagues Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford, who introduce the idea of acute events. Kate begins by outlining the idea of media ecologies involving a wide range of different media platforms, and their specific performance during acute events (such as crises, but also a range of similar events).

Jean follows on by defining acute events as significant real-world events which are associated with intense bursts in media activity – from political elections to royal weddings, from celebrity deaths to natural disasters. We can identify acute events on the basis of their timeline: a sharp peak of high volume and identity (whether locally or globally); highly mediated, involving multiple actors and interests; on Twitter, coordinated around specific #hashtags; and producing controversies and other adjunctive conversations associated more broadly with the topic.

Examining Entitativity on Facebook

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Anita Blanchard, whose interest is in entitativity on Facebook: the feeling of the ‘groupiness’ of specific groups. Such entitativity emerges from the presence of clear group boundaries, internal homogeneity between members, social interaction in the group, a clear group structure, and shared common goals held by all members. Such entitativity is a necessary precursor to key group processes and outcomes, such as a common group identity.

So, what is the level of entitativity on Facebook? How groupy can it be? There are a range of obvious groupings here: each member and their circle of friends, communicative groups as constituted in a fluid and ephemeral fashion through status updates, likes and comments, as well as formal interest and fan groups, of course.

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