Digital Rhetoric
James P. Zappen
Design Issues 2: The Participatory Web: User-Generated Content or
User-Generated Garbage?
A. Web 2.0 and Ajax
1. Web 2.0. "The central principle behind the success of the giants
born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era
appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to
harness collective intelligence." (2)
2. "One of the defining characteristics of internet era software is
that it is delivered as a service, not as a product. This fact leads to
a number of fundamental changes in the business model of such a
company:
1. Operations must become a core
competency . . . . So fundamental is the
shift from software as artifact to software as service that the
software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily
basis . . . . .
2. Users must be treated as
co-developers, in a reflection of open source development
practices . . . ." (4)
3. "In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a
format for the concise description of the solution to architectural
problems . . . .
1. The Long Tail
Small sites make up the bulk of the internet's content; narrow niches
make up the bulk of internet's the possible applications. Therefore:
Leverage customer-self service [sic] and algorithmic data management
to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center,
to the long tail and not just the head.
2. Data is the Next Intel Inside
Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive
advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data.
3. Users Add Value
The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent
to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore:
Don't restrict your 'architecture of participation' to software
development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in
adding value to your application . . . ." (5)
Tim O'Reilly, "What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for
the Next Generation of Software," O'Reilly Media (September 30, 2005),
2, 4, 5.
4. The Long Tail. "From the perspective of a store like Wal-Mart, the
music industry stops at less than 60,000 tracks. However, for online
retailers like Rhapsody the market is seemingly never-ending. Not only
is every one of Rhapsody's top 60,000 tracks streamed at least once
each month, but the same is true for its top 100,000, top 200,000, and
top 400,000—even its top 600,000, top 900,000, and beyond. As
fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an
audience, even if it's just a handful of people every month, somewhere
in the world.
This is the Long Tail." (22)
5. Producers and Consumers. "The traditional line between producers and
consumers has blurred. Consumers are also producers. Some create from
scratch; others modify the works of others, literally or figuratively
remixing it. In the blog world, we talk about 'the former
audience'—readers who have shifted from passive consumers to
active producers, commenting and blogging right back at the mainstream
media. Others contribute to the process nothing more than their
Internet-amplified word of mouth, doing what was once the work of radio
DJs, music magazine reviewers, and
marketers . . . . [As a consequence,] a
once-monolithic industry structure where professionals produced
and amateurs consumed is now a two-way marketplace, where anyone
can be in any camp at any time." (83-84)
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling
Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 22, 83-84.
B. Wikinomics as a New Business Model
1. "Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Goldcorp Challenge is the
validation of an ingenious approach to exploration in what remains a
conservative and highly secretive industry. Rob McEwen bucked an
industry trend by sharing the company's proprietary data and
simultaneously transformed a lumbering exploration process into a
modern distributed gold discovery engine that harnessed some of the
most talented minds in the field." (9)
2. "Call them the 'weapons of mass collaboration.' New low-cost
collaborative infrastructures—from free Internet telephony to
open source software to global outsourcing platforms—allow
thousands upon thousands of individuals and small producers to cocreate
products, access markets, and delight customers in ways that only large
corporations could manage in the past. This is giving rise to new
collaborative capabilities and business models that will empower the
prepared firm and destroy those that fail to adjust." (11)
3. "There are many names for this new Web: the Web 2.0, the living Web,
the Hypernet, the active Web, the read/write Web. Call it what you
like—the sentiment is the same. We're all participating in the
rise of a global, ubiquitous platform for computation and collaboration
that is reshaping nearly every aspect of human affairs. While the old
Web was about Web sites, clicks, and 'eyeballs,' the new Web is about
the communities, participation, and peering." (19)
4. "The new mass collaboration is changing how companies and societies
harness knowledge and capability to innovate and create value, This
affects just about every sector of society and every aspect of
management. A new kind of business is emerging—one that opens its
doors to the world, coinnovates with everyone (especially customers),
shares resources that were previously closely guarded, harnesses the
power of mass collaboration, and behaves not as a multinational but as
something new: a truly global firm.
The new art and science of wikinomics is based on
four powerful new ideas: openness, peering, sharing, and acting
globally, These new principles are replacing some of the old tenets of
business." (20)
C. Wikinomics as a Socio-Cultural Model
1. Participation. "Today the Net is evolving from a network of Web
sites that enable firms to present information into a computing
platform in its own right. Elements of a computer—and elements of
a computer program—can be spread out across the Internet and
seamlessly combined as necessary. The Internet is becoming a giant
computer that everyone can program, providing a global infrastructure
for creativity, participation, sharing, and self-organization.
How is this different from the Internet as it first
appeared? Think of the first iteration of the Web as a digital newspaper.
You could open its pages and observe its information, but you couldn't
modify or interact with it. And rarely could you communicate meaningfully
with its authors, apart from sending an email to the editor.
The new Web is fundamentally different in both its
architecture and applications. Instead of a digital newspaper, think of a
shared canvas where every splash of paint contributed by one user provides
a richer tapestry for the next user to modify or build on. Whether people
are creating, sharing, or socializing, the new Web is principally about
participating rather than about passively receiving information." (37)
2. Conversation. "Today the blogging phenomenon points the way to the
most profound changes the new Web will wreak on the economy. Blogs have
been described as the biggest coffeehouse on earth. They capture a
moment-to-moment picture of people's thoughts and feelings about things
happening right now, turning the Web from a collection of static
documents into a running conversation . . . .
The potential for blogs to become richer and more
engaging will only grow as people build audio and video into their
posts. Do it yourself Web television stations like YouTube are already
booming . . . . It's no longer just the print media
that is in danger, but producers of commercial television, radio, and
movies as well." (39-41)
3. Collective Intelligence. "Author James Surowiecki calls it the 'The
Wisdom of Crowds' and traces the application of collective intelligence
across domains such as science, politics, and business. For us, the
ability to pool the knowledge of millions (if not billions) of users in
a self-organizing fashion demonstrates how mass collaboration is turning
the new Web into something not completely unlike a global brain.
Smart companies are now harnessing this potential
to develop powerful new business models and systems. When you shop
at Amazon, for example, you benefit not just from the distributed
rating system that enables customers to review books (and for those
reviews to be reviewed in turn) but from a remarkably sophisticated
system that searches for similarities among the purchases of all
Amazon customers in order to suggest books that you are likely to
enjoy." (41)
4. Connectedness. "Tagging harnesses a technology called XML to allow
users to affix descriptive labels or keywords to content (techies call
it 'metadata,' or data about data). Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly
aptly describes a tag as a public annotation—like a keyword or
category name that you hang on a file, Web page, or picture. When
people tag content collaboratively it creates a 'folksonomy,'
essentially a bottom-up, organic taxonomy that organizes content on the
Web." (41-42)
5. Openness and Trust. "For today's new Web companies, building trust is
the alternative to controlling customers . . . .
More and more Web companies are realizing that openness
fosters trust, and that trust and community bring people back
to the site . . . . Call them the new public
squares—vibrant meeting places where your customers come back for
the rich and engaging experiences. Relationships, after all, are the
one thing you can't commoditize." (43-44)
6. Collaboration. "What is significant today about the notion of
emergence is that we are seeing sophisticated artifacts and outcomes
emerging from relatively diffuse, loosely coupled activities of
collaborating agents supported by Web-based tools. Examples of this are
legion: open source software creation, the blogosphere (blogs,
augmented with blogrolls and RSS feeds), Google, Amazon, collaborative
filtering, scientific discovery, and wikis." (44)
7. Wikinomics. "Now, having largely mastered the productive challenges
of our physical environment, we find ourselves confronting the
opportunities of the cerebral environment, an increasingly virtual
world of knowledge, media, and entertainment; a world girdled by
information involving billions of connected individuals; a world where
anyone can plug-and-play and where collaboration between diverse
entities is the modus operandi of the day. We call it the world of
"wikinomics"—in which the perfect storm of technology,
demographics, and global economics is an unrelenting force for change
and innovation." (64)
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams Wikinomics: How Mass
Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Penguin Group,
Portfolio, 2006), 9, 11, 19-20, 37, 39-44, 64.
8. The Cult of the Amateur. "This blurring of lines between the
audience and the author, between fact and fiction, between invention
and reality further obscures objectivity. The cult of the amateur has
made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between
reader and writer, between artist and spin doctor, between art and
advertisement, between amateur and expert. The result? The decline of
the quality and reliability of the information we receive, thereby
distorting, if not outrightly corrupting, our national civic
conversation.
But perhaps the biggest casualties of the Web 2.0
revolution are real businesses with real products, real employees, and
real shareholders . . . . Every defunct record
label, or laid-off newspaper reporter, or bankrupt independent
bookstore is a consequence of 'free' user-generated Internet
content—from Craigslist's free advertising, to YouTube's free
music videos, to Wikipedia's free information." (27)
9. Collective Intelligence? "In his recent bestselling book The Long
Tail, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson celebrates this
flattening of culture, which he describes as the end of the hit parade.
In Anderson's brave new world, there will be infinite shelf space for
infinite products, thus giving everyone infinite choice. The Long
Tail virtually redefines the word 'economics'—shifting it
from the science of scarcity to the science of abundancy, and promising
an infinite market in which we cycle and recycle our cultural
production to our hearts' content. It's a seductive notion. But even if
one accepts Anderson's dubious economic arguments, the Long Tail theory
has a glaring hole. Anderson assumes that raw talent is as infinite as
the shelf space at Amazon or eBay. But while there may be infinite
typewriters, there is a scarcity of talent, expertise, experience, and
mastery in any given field. Finding and nurturing true talent in a sea
of amateurs may be the real challenge in today's Web 2.0 world."
(29-30)
10. "So anyone with a bit of tech savvy can rig the supposedly
democratic Internet by repeatedly hyperlinking or cross-linking certain
pages that they want to show up first in Google searches. These bombers
are attempting to corrupt the collective 'wisdom' stored in the Google
algorithm.
Rather than user-generated content, what Google
bombing represents is another kind of UGC—user-generated
corruption . . . .
Clearly, the wisdom of the crowd is an
illusion—the anonymous influences on Digg or Reddit are not more
to be trusted than the amateur editors at Wikipedia or the anonymous
amateur filmmakers on YouTube." (93-95)
Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing
Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, Currency, 2007), 27, 29-30, 93-95.
D. Producers/Produsers
1. The Industrial economy. "Nonetheless, especially in the early stages
of the industrial age, power structures in the production value chain
were very strongly slanted in favor of producers and (to some extent)
distributors rather than consumers; building on Fordist and Taylorist
models for organizing their production lines, corporations focused on
maximizing production efficiency and worker productivity rather than
consumer satisfaction. The famous adage used to describe the product
choices available for customers of the Ford Motor Company, 'you can have
any color you like, as long as it's black,' aptly describes the options
generally made available to customers." (10)
2. "Under the new network paradigm, by contrast,
producers and users of media content are both simply nodes in a neutral
network and communicate with one another on an equal level.
This is particularly empowering for users, who now
have access to a greater range of tools to network and build communities
among themselves, away from the topdown mediated spaces of the traditional
mediaspheres. Whether focusing in the main on peer-to-peer communication,
or directed specifically at the collaborative creation of content,
their interactions are now predominantly commons-based, as [Yochai]
Benkler has pointed out [in The Wealth of Networks]; thus, having
already moved from an industrial to an informational economy during
the latter part of the twentieth century, a further shift towards a
'networked information economy' is now taking place:
what characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized
individual action—specifically, new and important cooperative and
coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket
mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies—plays a much
greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information
economy." (14)
3. The Hive Mind. "Provided suitable tools and frameworks, then (including
effective means for private and public ephemeral conversation, and for the
publication of a more permanent record of the community's interactions
and exchanges and of the information and knowledge contained in such
engagement), what the network model makes possible is the existence
of a distributed but coordinated community, organized not according
to the directions of a central authority to which all other nodes in
the network are subordinate, but by the community's own protocols of
interaction. This is what J. C. Herz has described as the 'hive mind,'
playing on imagery of collectivist species in popular science fiction
stories as much as on the studies of real-life hives in the world of
insects which may have inspired such fiction." (15)
4. Intercreativity. "Intercreativity constitutes a significant step
beyond mere interactivity—a step made possible by the use of
non-hierarchical, many-to-many media: in intercreative environments,
users collaborate (often in large communities) on the development and
extension of shared informational resources of common interest, rather
than merely interacting with the material already available; they are
taking into their own hands the tools to create content." (16)
5. Collective Intelligence. "Networked community intercreativity,
participatory culture, and what we will describe more systematically here
as the collaborative produsage of information and knowledge by 'hive mind'
communities, may have the potential to bring about the development, from
the myriads of small contributions by individual participants in the
'hive mind,' of a networked, distributed, decentralized collective
intelligence." (16)
6. Affordances of Produsage. "The collective and networked approach is
able to draw on four such key affordances, each of which profoundly
affects and shapes the model of collective content creation which
we will describe as produsage: 1. Probabilistic, not directed
problem-solving . . . . 2. Equipotentiality,
not hierarchy . . . . 3. Granular, not
composite tasks . . . . 4. Shared, not owned
content . . . ." (20)
7. Processes of Produsage. "In collaborative communities the creation
of shared content takes place in a networked, participatory environment
which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and
instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of
information and knowledge—frequently in a hybrid role of produser
where usage is necessarily also productive. Produsers engage not in
a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in
produsage—the collaborative and continuous building and
extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement." (21)
8. Principles of Produsage. "The four principles of produsage, which
can be seen in action in the produsage sites and models which we will
study throughout this book, build directly on the four preconditions
for produsage . . . . Open Participation,
Communal Evaluation . . . . Fluid Heterarchy,
Ad Hoc Meritocracy . . . . Unfinished
Artefacts, Continuing Process . . . . Common
Property, Individual Rewards . . . ." (24-30)
9. Models of Produsage. "Crowdsourcing is only one possible
approach to the commercial embrace of produsage communities
and of the content they create, however. Overall, such
approaches can be broadly divided into the following models:
Feeding the hive . . . . Helping
the hive . . . . Harboring
the hive . . . . Harnessing
the hive . . . . Harvesting
the hive . . . . Hijacking the
hive . . . . " (31-33).
10. From Print to Digital Media. "'Our renaissance's answer to the
printing press is the computer and its ability to network. Just as the
printing press gave everyone access to readership, the computer and
internet give everyone access to authorship. The first Renaissance took
us from the position of passive recipient to active interpreter. Our
current renaissance brings us from the role of interpreter to the role
of author. We are the creators . . . .'
What may result from this renaissance of information,
knowledge, and creative work, collaboratively developed, compiled, and
shared under a produsage model, may be a fundamental reconfiguration of
our cultural and intellectual life, and thus of society and democracy
itself." (34)
Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From
Production to Produsage, Digital Formations (New York: Peter Lang,
2008), 10, 14-16, 20-21, 24-34.
E. Web 2.0 and Ajax: Illustrations
1. HousingMaps:
http://www.housingmaps.com/
(Click on the balloons on the map.)
2. StoryMapping:
http://www.storymapping.org/
(See especially the Projects.)
3. Ajax Server-Request Function:
http://www.rpi.edu/~zappenj/Ajax/LoremIpsum6/loremipsum.html
4. Ajax Drag-and-Drop Function:
http://www.rpi.edu/~zappenj/Ajax/DragDrop2/dragdrop.html
Latest Update: 2011-09-12
