[I posted this to the iDC list but I think it will be useful also here if slightly out of context.] 

Participation

Current debates focus too much on what sociable web media can do and not enough on the people who use them. The difficulties and dynamics of eliciting contributions in an online environment are often underestimated. The motivations of the people who add content to online environments matter a great deal for those who seek to populate these online environments.

 
Interaction is not the topic here; I'm not focusing on the realtime interplay of networked actors (i.e. a networked Keyworx performance). With the term participation I'm referring to content contribution in the context of sociable web media.

In his book "Collective Action" Russell Hardin writes:

"That we are social creatures is not only a philosophical thesis; it is also a commonsense realization. We become more than we are by reading Shakespeare and the Greeks, by listening to Bach, Beethoven, and Bartok-- and by participating in certain events and movements, for example, by going to war or refusing to go to war. Whether it is called moral or self-interested, the urge to participate is a fundamental motivation." 

The social bookmarking site del.icio.us is a suitable example for the debate over individual versus network value. On del.icio.us, contributors, myself included, save bookmarks not solely because they support an imagined "del.icio.us collective;" they don't primarily want to support the Yahoo-owned project: they contribute out of self-interest.

Adam Smith talked about individual action that benefits the collective as the "invisible hand;" every individual contribution to the general productiveness of society intends to foster individual gain and is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

While Smith is controversial, his notion of the invisible hand is useful here. A closer look at the invisible hand reveals that it does not exclude a simultaneous conscious support of a collective. The number of frequent contributors to Wikipedia, for example, is relatively small and their motivations for participation are not completely non-agonistic (pure sharing; higher goals; help humanity). Hanah Arendt argued that people have a keen interest in contributing to something larger than themselves but most contributors to this free encyclopedia are, however, driven by authorship pride -- and -- an urge to contribute to the public good.
 
An additional variant of motivation for participation is “agonistic giving,” which Benkler sums up with the sentence "I give therefore I'm great." Benkler adds other types of motivations: “individualist and solidaristic” (teams; assertion of my individuality) and “reciprocity” (p2p networks). In the context of sites like CiteUlike, del.icio.us, and others, I suggest that contributors are driven by a hybrid mix of motivations. They are not exclusively in it for themselves but they are also not completely driven by the idea of the greater good.

People contribute to sociable web media to find emotional support, a sense of belonging, relaxation, and encouragement, in addition to instrumental aid (finding a job, making money). Social capital is an additional motivating aspect, as Nick pointed out. But don't forget fun. Russel Hardin talks about participation in demonstrations, driven by the desire to be part of history; it is propelled by the desire "to share the experiences of [one's] time and place." Harding focuses on the civil rights movement, a time when people took to the streets to participate in a social movement that they believed in. They participated, in addition to moral reasons, because the civil rights movement was a hugely formative series of events that they wanted to be a part of. Demonstrating can be a pleasurable experience. Edward Banfield's text "Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit" reflects on the American race riots of 1965-70 and describes a certain excitement of young males to confront police as an undeniable (however partial) motivation for protest. Can such arguments be successfully applied to participatory behavior in sociable web media? Perhaps the general blogging hype of 2004 motivated some people to give blogging a try, simply driven by the desire to share the experience of this huge phenomenon.      

Time is another often discussed precondition for participation that pervades this discussion. Nick: "For they could use this time to write a poem, cut up zucchini for dinner, or work for their local political party; but they would rather work for free for some broader public." What motivates people to prioritize participation in sociable web media over other important tasks? Who has the temporal freedom to participate? The blueprints for participation in sociable web media and their multi-faceted hierarchies of gift exchanges have not been researched enough. Brian Holmes and Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, among many others, are critical about the liberating potential of digital social communication. For Lazzarato network technologies are even more totalitarian than Henry Ford’s assembly line. Just take control and commercialization of participation. Businesses become free riders of the browsing net publics; their attention often leads to unpaid content production. Amazon.com, for example, is in the process of adding wiki and blogging power to their site. The Washington Post and The New York Times just launched commenting features on their websites.

<http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2005/11/wikizon.html>

Yochai Benkler asserts that participants in NASA's ClickWorkers initiative have spare time on their hand. But others go so far to argue that participation in sociable web media is a luxury of a privileged few, neatly divided by income and class, leaving the poor and traditionally disenfranchised in the non-participatory dark. Is this a fair portray of what is happening? 

Mark Warschauer in his book “Technologies and Social Inclusion” points to preconditions for participation such as access to technology, Internet access, ability to read, write, and author in a digital environment (i.e. knowing how to use a wiki), remembering the URL of a website, bandwidth, cost of equipment, the ease of use of the technological infrastructure, time management, and vast issues of age, race, and gender. These preconditions need to be met indeed but perhaps the digital divide is not what it used to be.

I am not immediately convinced that participation in sociable web media is really divided along lines of traditional disenfranchisement. Just consider that in March 2006 the Web comprised a total of 694 million unique visitors (i.e. 152.1 million in the USA and 74.7 million in China) and The Washington Post reports that in March 2006 alone 15.6 million people used Blogger.com, YouTube had 12.5 million unique users, and that MySpace.com had 37 million contributing visitors that month alone.

Social networking sites in general attracted 45% of active Internet users in the US in April 2006. Recent studies by the Pew Internet and American Life Project have shown that 73% of all Americans identify themselves as Internet users, of which 51 million (57% of all American teenagers) are involved in online content production.

Such surveys are not irrefutable but I would conclude that a division of participation in sociable web media along lines of traditional disenfranchisement at least not be merely assumed. 

<http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/173/report_display.asp>
<http://www.cybersoc.com/2006/05/nearly_50_of_us.html>
<http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/10/business/ptend11.php>
<http://www.whak.com/off/?208>
<http://www.cybersoc.com/2006/05/nearly_50_of_us.html>
<http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/184/report_display.asp>
<http://www.whak.com/off/?234>

What is the nature of groups contributing to read/write systems like del.icio.us? Are they collectives or even Etienne Wenger's "communities of practice"? Is del.icio.us a collaborative project? I propose that is not. In his book "Culture and Society" Raymond Williams argues that while one can address individuals as a mass, there are no masses. The collective can also be understood in these terms. Individual goals of participants are not always shared by the "group," which gives the del.icio.us project a decisively non-collaborative character. What does collaboration mean? Collaboration is generally a risky, intensive form of working together with a common goal. The gain or loss is shared among all. Cooperation, on the other hand, is a less intensive form of working together in which participants account for gain or loss individually. Contributors have individual goals. Howard Rheingold's term “cooperation-enhancing technologies” sensibly describes systems such as deli.cio.us. 

Some radical activists using del.icio.us save all bookmarks without tagging them; they get therefore saved under the category "unfiled." Through this practice activists consciously avoid the control aspect of the participatory panopticon. Their bookmarks are just meant as reference for themselves. No sensible tag search would lead to their del.icio.us site. If the majority of contributors had used del.icio.us in that way, the project would have been a failure, as the popular interconnections between different users would not have occurred because they are based on tagged bookmarks. Without tagging no link between user sites can be established. The "social" in "social bookmarking" would be lost at least in part. (How would you find these users, short of them providing you with their del.icio.us username/URL?) However, the described saving practice is still helpful for the individual activist in this case. This example demonstrates the nature of cooperation, not collaboration, at work. Dana Boyd writes: "People have different needs, different goals. People manipulate given structures to meet their needs. [...] Folksonomy is emerging as a dance between the individual and the collective..."

<http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/09/05/why_web20_matte.html>

Did Contributions by Intellectuals Loose Their Power? 

Jürgen Habermas' ideas about the public sphere made him a prominent social theorist. In March 2006 Habermas expanded his comments to include the networked public sphere:

"Use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication. This is why the Internet can have a subversive effect on intellectual life in authoritarian regimes. But at the same time, the less formal, horizontal cross-linking of communication channels weakens the achievements of traditional media. This focuses the attention of an anonymous and dispersed public on select topics and information, allowing citizens to concentrate on the same critically filtered issues and journalistic pieces at any given time. The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus." 

 -Jürgen Habermas (03/09/06: acceptance speech for Bruno Kreisky Prize)

Is Habermas correct when he argues that "the contributions by intellectuals loose their power" due to the broadened contexts of communication that the Internet provides? Some of the influence of traditional mass media is diminished by the blogosphere and in Europe that may indeed mean that intellectuals have become a bit less visible. (In the U.S. that problem does not come up as cultural theorists play hardly any role in the national debate anyway.)

On the other hand, one could argue that some voices of well-known scholars make it onto high traffic meta-weblogs; references to Douglas Rushkoff's books or Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" repeatedly appeared on Boingboing.net. Thus the visibility of an intellectual within the networked public sphere is related to the scholar's reputation within a closely-knit web of affiliations. The traffic that a site attracts matters less than the relevance of the reader to the text. Recent blog studies have shown that daily posting is not the indicator of a more successful blog anymore. Traffic does not necessarily determine influence within a certain field. Instead it matters greatly who visits a particular site. Thus, I argue that it is quite different if Jürgen Habermas speaks up online or if a teenager in Australia writes about his world pain. Communication channels are in fact not completely horizontal. Increasingly super high-traffic sites distinguish themselves from other websites that remain unvisited. The reputation economy will amplify the voice of intellectuals like Habermas. 

<http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2006/04/jurgen_habermas.html>  

Many-to-Many Control & Vulnerability

Openness and control are a baffling couple. People watching on social networking sites is the new sport of the Pentagon, the Police, and some employers. Internet firms were asked by the US Justice Department to keep search records. Jamais Cascio describes what happens to sociable web media as participatory panopticon. But the surveillance that Miguel and Dara point to is not a situation in which one guard watches an entire group of prisoners. What they refer to is better called "many-to-many surveillance." Rather than an one-pointed panopticon it is better compared to a large public sauna or a Brazilian beach, crawling
with sexual predators (just like on MySpace): everybody watching everybody else; a kaleidoscope of control with an endless number of mirrors. Or, a bit less benevolent, think of a house with thin walls; the backyards of pre-war buildings in Berlin create a similar surveillance scenario where no marital feud remains private.

During my repeated travels to Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I saw posters showing collapsed men, pinned on trees in neighborhood parks. The police took the photographs on location. The posters stated something like “This is comrade XYZ, worker in the butter factory. He was found collapsed of drunkenness in this park last Tuesday at 3am.” Given today’s social networking sites such reprimanding public displays are not necessary anymore. Youngsters voluntarily post documentation of such escapades on their Facebook or MySpace site, freely accessible for their potential employers.  

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/06/02/MNGK5J6B9I1.DTL&type=printable>
<http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025556.200?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19025556.200>
<http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=18015>

Folk Content: Grab the Keyboard, Buddy, Rupert Murdoch Needs You!

In a vague and overly generalized manner Jaron Lanier’s text “Digital Maoism” recently criticized the idea of the collective that will correct itself (described also in Eric Raymond’s book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar:" ”Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”). Lanier questioned what he calls the “collectivity fad” and the “epidemic of inappropriate uses of the collective.” He rails against the “wikiization” of everything, asking if the collective is really always that smart. Paralleling the centrality of “American Idol” (argh) to that of Wikipedia he asserts that the entries into this free online encyclopedia are “anonymous, faux-authoritative, and anti-contextual.” For Lanier, Wikipedia is an online fetish site for "foolish collectivism" that crosses the line into delusion while at the same time lacking meritocracy. He asserts that the “hive mind” that unfolds on websites like diggit.com is for the most part boring and stupid. What is popular is not always the “best,” most innovative, or thought through but Lanier misses out on an analysis of the cumulative quality of Wikipedia. 

In a sharp response to Lanier’s text Clay Shirky writes: “To have a discussion about the plusses and minuses of various forms of group action, though, is going to require discussing the current tools and services as they exist, rather than discussing their caricatures or simply wishing that they would disappear.” I agree with Shirky with this point: A critique of sociable web media needs to be anchored in specific examples. A lack of specificity is emblematic for narratives that fear or dislike technologies. Here, insight into rapidly changing technological developments is absent, which makes it hard to really consider the core of social developments truthfully.
 
The question of quality of uploaded content comes up frequently. It is true that many sites that solicit contributions trigger rather folksy amateur entries. According to Lanier, participatory wiki culture waters down content. He is, for instance, critical of the writing on many blogs and lists: “Real writing ... involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday's moves in a conversation.”

But why call it “Digital Maoism?” Today's headlines like “Folksonomies Tap People Power” sound more closely aligned with the 60s slogans of the "Bitterfelder Path" (Bitterfeld Path). This East German artistic worker's movement offers a better metaphor for the massification of sociable web media.

On April 24, 1959 the conference of authors of the Mitteldeutscher Verlag publishing company, met (naturally) in a Chemistry factory in the highly polluted city of Bitterfeld to finally put an end to the gap between art and life. Factory workers were supposed to be supported in their artistic work. The motto was “Grab the pen, buddy, Socialist German National Culture needs you!” ("Greif zur Feder, Kumpel, die sozialistische deutsche Nationalkultur braucht dich!"). The results of this movement ranged from heartbreaking artistic disaster to (very few) good works. My point with “Grab the Keyboard, Buddy, Rupert Murdoch Needs You!” relates more to the question of commercialization of content provision to sites like MySpace than the actual quality of what is contributed.

However, a sociable media movement of Walmart or McDonald’s workers (2.0) would excite me. There are positive examples of such Barbara Ehrenreich-esque initiatives. (Ehrenreich, of course, was not actually a worker at Walmart for too long).

In addition, the populism of high-traffic blogs and the Itunes store music ratings plays into this discussion. One cannot interpret mass popularity (i.e. iTunes ratings) as an objective sign of quality.

<http://blog.wakeupwalmart.com/ufcw/2006/03/former_walmart.html>
<http://walmartwatch.com/blog/P528/>
<http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66456,00.html?>

Plural Monocultures

What else is there on the dark side of sociable web media? Tiziana Terranova points out that the openness of virtual space reinforces narrow group identities. According to Tiziana, this openness creates archipelagos of disconnected islands. Super-special interest groups form online. Here, nobody is off-topic and everybody is an expert at whatever bonding glue holds the group together. Racial tensions and economic disparities are not an issue and conflict can be kept at a minimum. In cozy isolation issues can be discussed in a focused, yet exclusive way. The Korea Times reports that people live in digital cocoons: “in one of the world's most advanced digital hotbeds - more and more folks are retreating to their homes instead of socializing with others.”

These archipelagos of the Internet form what Harvard Professor of Economy Amartya Sen, in another context, calls "plural monocultures." The Internet becomes a fabulous host for this type of multiculturalism. Often, no two opinions have to confront each other. In their own inner chamber people can forget about racial, ethnic or economical differences and just talk about the very narrow interest set that connects them. Such focus is appealing in the face of hours of daily web drifting. There is too little time to deal with all the information that is thrown at those inhabiting the web. These super-special interest groups are
monocultures. Conversations take place next to each other, crossovers are expelled as being "off-topic" (Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam describes this in detail in his book “Bowling Alone”) and in this expert culture other voices are assumed to be non-experts.
 
<http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200605/kt2006052316495668040.htm>
<http://www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin/homepage/podcasts/immaterial/>
<http://knowprose.com/node/15107>
<http://www.whak.com/off/?238>
<http://www.whak.com/off/?239>

Consequently, having looked at the dynamics of participation and a few points of critique of sociable media, I urge those who are invested in such media to consider the dynamics of participation and control inherent in social web media.

To reject autonomous uses of online sociality would be wrong; it'd suggest that there cannot be any use of technology that fosters civil society while the future of the Internet may be in fact determined by social networking.

Boyd: "Technology needs to support social and cultural practices rather than determining culture. Technology is architecture and, thus, the design of it is critical because the decisions made will have dramatic effects. Digital architecture is unburdened by atoms but it is not unburdened by human tendencies of control. ... Let the technology … follow the desires and needs of people."

Where are the unorthodox sociable spaces of “positive politics?”

Trebor Scholz



Sites of hope: (I would like to hear more examples from you.)
 
BlogAfrica
<http://allafrica.com/>
 
Center for Citizen Media
<http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/06/13/citizen-business-reporters-and-disclosure-issue-in-new-site/>
 
Student protests organized on MySpace.
<http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/27/la_student_protests_.html>

Constructive Activism, Part IV: When Googlebombing Doesn't Work
<http://civilities.net/ConstructiveActivism-Googlebombing>

Activist Blogs: Blogging For Societal Change
<http://www.whak.com/off/?233>

WikiThePresidency
<http://www.wikithepresidency.com/index.php/Main_Page#Constitutional_Violations>

Radical Reference
<http://www.radicalreference.info/>

BlogLeft
<http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/blogger.php>

Counterproductive Industries
<http://www.counterproductiveindustries.com/>

Tor: An anonymous Internet communication system
<http://tor.eff.org/>