I started this blog off with the cat picture for two
reasons. The first reason is that I find it extremely funny and just wanted to
share it with you. The second reason is that I believe this picture puts into
perspective the idea of crowd sourcing on the internet. The idea behind crowd sourcing is that the
internet could be used for political, journalistic, or democratic reasons. The
idea is that, if offered the chance, people would use crowd sourcing to
increase the effectiveness or quality of journalism or that the political and
democratic processes could allow for more input from the general public in
order to make the process a better one. The problem with this idea is that, as
an article from UC Berkley’s News Center stated, the internet is still
dominated by those from a higher socio-economic status. Basically, those who
have college degrees are the ones who are producing on-line content. The
digital divide between those who have a college degree and those who do not as
it pertains to the production of internet content.
So, you may be asking yourself how that ties in with the
picture and the ideal of the internet versus the reality. The idea behind crowd
sourcing is really a nice idea but it is predicated on the idea that people
actually want to produce content when the reality is that more people are happy
just being consumers of content. If we
look at the website Reddit.com we get a good example of how this works. On the
website people post content. This would represent that smaller group of people
who actually produce their own content. However, the interaction does not stop
there. Then people who consume the content decide whether they like it or not.
They do this by voting the content up or down.
This brings me to my next point. It is that, through the
participation of “liking” something or voting it up or down on websites like
Youtube and Reddit the people that some consider to be left out are actually
letting their opinions be heard. This goes against the idea of crowd sourcing
because those who say that crowd sourcing is the best way would be looking for
the answers in the comment sections of the blogs and videos that the people
voted up or down without realizing that the answers they seek are actually in
the votes themselves.
As I said before, not everyone is going to want to produce
content but that does not mean that everyone does not want their voice heard.
The way that they accomplish this is by supporting the ideas and content that
they like. This is also a good way to measure what the general public thinks is
important. In one of my earlier blogs I mentioned the story of how Reddit
helped an environmental group save some whales by helping increase awareness
about the plight that the whales were going through. This happened but not in
the way that the group wanted because they wanted a, to them, meaningful name
given to the whale. Instead, in large part because of Reddit, the name of the
whale became Mr. Splashypants. This is an excellent illustration of what the
general public considers important. The
people who frequent Reddit considered the saving of the whale to be important
but they still wanted it on their terms. They wanted a much less “meaningful”
name than what the people of the environmental group wanted.
So, in that instance, you have a good example of crowd
sourcing working but not in the way that so many intend for it to. It is funny that we have this tool and so many
experts expect the general public to use it in the manner that they have
designated as appropriate but internet users have said otherwise. This is sort
of like if someone had given a person a hammer in a room full of nails, told
them that the purpose of the hammer was only to pry things loose and then got
mad when that person started hammering the nails into some wood.
That is not to say that crowd sourcing will never work. For
instance, there is a website http://www.lolcatbible.com/
. The Lol Cat Bible is an example of crowd sourcing. If a Christian started the
project, the project was not the ultimate goal. The first picture that I posted
was an example of lolcats. With these memes come a particular style of
communication and this has become very popular. So someone took this style of speech
and started a project of transposing the Bible into lolcat speech. In order for
this to happen, people who might have never read the Bible will end up reading
the Bible. Not only that but the people who help with this project had to think
about what the Bible was saying in order to help transpose the words into
lolcat speak. The ultimate goal here would be for people to read the Bible and
it would have been accomplished through as act of crowd sourcing.
The internet has a rich culture and I think it would be a
mistake to try and change the culture to fit the tool. Rather, we should make
the tool work for the culture. There are a lot of personalities that have sway
over people online. Not because they stand for any political affiliation or
because they are an awesome journalist but because they understand and pander
to the internet culture. Wil Wheaton, star of Star Trek the Next Generation and the movie Stand by Me is one of those people. He has a show on a Youtube
channel and because people like his show they will also listen to what he has
to say about other issues. He knows how to make the internet work for him.
Another example of this is a game caster called Husky Starcraft. Husky and
several of his roommates have thousands of followers online and is an activist
for online freedoms. Because he knows the culture he is able to affect change.
This is something that we, as communicators should understand. We approach
audiences differently depending in who they are. It would make sense to do the
same when it came to the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment