eBay – to insure that both buyers and sellers would commit to their online bidding transactions in real life, eBay instilled a rating system.  The rating system held members accountable and provided a small (yet desirable, in the eyes of the community) reward –a higher rating number/color.

Wikipedia vs. Microsoft Encarta – Wikipedia marked a revolution of the encyclopedia.  In efforts to mimic the success of the wiki, Microsoft added a wiki component to their online multimedia encyclopedia: Encarta.  However, Encarta’s wiki did not take off like Wikipedia did.  The small differences in the platform made Wikipedia more of an asset and benefit to the larger community of users.  Under Encarta’s wiki, users would be unable to directly alter their encyclopedia: everything would come following Microsoft’s approval (not only would users have to pay Microsofts initial fee to gain access to Encarta),  Having direct input, ownership, and accountability (however indirect or removed thanks to anonymity), made the Wiki encyclopedia prevail over Microsoft’s.

Flickr – When flickr began requiring its users to use a yahoo ID following yahoo’s acquisition of the photo uploading site, a small revolt amongst prior members occurred.  However, by the time of this small groups complaint, flickr had built such a large community that these disgruntled few did not disrupt the overall community.

Digg – When a DVD encryption code was released on the Internet, a website aggregator (digg) based on user popularity and ranking systems prevented its users from ranking sites with the illegal encryption information.  Digg, a community based on importance of the user’s voice, soon became bombarded with users relentlessly favoriting sites with the illegal code.  Ultimately, digg decided to allow for the illegal code to be posted on their site, saying: “After seeing hundreds of stories and readings thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear.  You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company.  We hear you, and effective immediately we wont delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.  If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying” (Shirky, 291).  Ultimately the collective action of the community of Digg users were able to make a difference and proved the importance of the community to the existence of the Digg platform.  Also, Digg never received any negative ramifications from the posting of the code on their website.

The following examples show how specific details of the platform and purpose affect social groups.  Since the Internet has allowed for multiple media and platforms presenting multiple options to users, we have seen many shifts in popular online social communities.  For example, just in the past eight years there has been a shift from Livejournal, to Myspace, to Facebook, and now to Twitter.  The shift from dominant social networking medium has occurred as the needs of the community have changed.  The platform best meeting the communities needs during a particular time will be the one to succeed and take off.  With the Internet allowing the rise and fall of social groups more quickly and diversely, we can use these group interactions as metaphors to learn more about our group interactions and needs in the offline world.

1. Promise: reason people get involved in collaborations
2. Tool: facilitators of such collaborative work
3. Bargain: the rules and expectations of the collaborative group

It is when all three of the requirements are properly met and executed that a group succeeds in collaboration. In my section, I will be focusing on the bargain aspect and also touch on the complexities of collaboration.

A bargain defines the expectations of a group so that everyone can agree and follow accordingly. A successful bargain is one that is “a good fit for both he promise and the tool used” (261). Sometimes the bargain is simple, as in the case of Ivanna’s phone Shirky discusses in Chapter 1. Social networks come with more intricacy. In Flickr groups, there are intricate rules about posting that users must observe. For instance, you are not allowed to post pictures if you do not comment on the two previous images, and you must wait before making multiple postings. This is to combat Tragedy of the Commons, the temptation for user to post their work for potential viewers, but not bothering to pay attention to anyone else’s photos. Alan Page Friske refers to this phenomenon as “equality matching,” where the most talented members of the group don’t get much more attention than the least talented” (276).

This seemed to echo the concerns of Lanier (although not as extreme). Regardless of your talent, people are “forced” to comment on your picture and praise you, even if your picture sucks. Not that I have a problem with mediocrity, but should we really be falsely celebrating the bad because we have to follow some rule to participate in the group? What are your thoughts – is equality matching something positive or negative?

Shirky explains while some bargains are fair, like in the case of Wikipedia, others are often biased. The bargain of Wiki sites is that “you can edit anyone else’s writing and anyone else can edit yours” (271).  Fake entries are quickly removed by users, the guardians of the guards. With flash mobs, the bargain is gathering together, doing something outrageous, and getting the pleasure of watching people gape. In this case, the bargain is unbalanced because the power belongs to the head organizer, not the participants. In Belarus, however, the flash mobs altered the meaning of flash mob participation when a large group of people agreed to meet in a public square and simultaneously eat ice cream.

Like the ice cream incident in Belarus, the bargain must be “a part of the lived experience of interaction” as opposed to a traditional contract (273). However, Shirky writes there are times when contacts are necessary. In the case of the Spanish Wikipedia, users worried that the website would soon become commercial and lose its impartiality. They even threatened to “fork,” and start a new site that would not have any commercial interests. In response to the public’s concern, Jimmy Wales applied the GNU Free Documentation License for Wikipedia and the site became a .org page. This guaranteed that commercial interests would never interfere with the content, and helped build a trust between the organization and the millions of users.

Though the concepts of promise, tool, and bargain seem simple enough, execution is difficult and complex. The interactions within the group also contribute to the intricacy. The promise of Wikipedia, for example, has gone from the simple “you can help” to the more complex and slightly distant “imagine an awesome world of infinite knowledge.”

Within a large group, there are smaller subgroups, and each of these groups comes with its own bargain. MySpace is considered a tool for small groups, because it starts off with your profile, which links to your friends, and then on to their friends. The numerous subgroups and varying bargains pose the question of whether Wikipedia is really a community. While users collaborate to update information, they lack direct interaction with one another. Shirky argues that both arguments are true. The “core community,” or the heavily committed contributors, guards the system, and thousands of contributors upload tidbits of information. Because of the complexity of interaction between the various subgroups in Wikipedia, the 80/20 rule optimization will only alienate members who are critical to the success of the system.

These days, groups use customized software and often use multiple tools. These tools cater to the unique bargains of each group. Group environment customization is also common, as seen in the case of the Flickr groups and their rigid rules. Shirky illustrates that on alt.folkore.urban, the word veracity was replaced by voracity. This form of “trolling” was embraced and regarded as a “norm… sustained by the community” (281).

This is the first time I have ever seen trolling seen in a positive light. Usually when I think of trolls, I think of 4Chan (and WoW), where it’s usually seen as negative (or just ludicrous). You can read about the negative aspects of trolls and teh lulz here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html

Facebook Network selection requirement

This week’s reading was Clay Shirky’s last chapter in Here Comes Everybody, chapter 11: Promise, Tool, Bargain. Shirky explains that en though “there is no recipe for the successful use of social tools…every working system is a mix of social and technological factors.” (260) Despite the inability to find an exact formula for success he claims that every successful example in his book has used the following three elements:

1.) Promise – This is the “why” someone should join or contribute to a specific group. It is vitally important because it is the the promise that converts the potential user into an actual user. Shirky explains that the key to a good promise is balancing between being too broad or too extreme. The key is that “the implicit promise of any given group matters more than any explicit one” (262). This idea of creating meaning and convincing  the potential user is unique because it is not simple “selling” the idea of social media, but convincing users to actually participate and take action.

Creating the promise is complicated by many factors, including the paradox of group or basically that a group can not exist without members, but no one is not a member until they are part of a group. “With social tools, the group is the user, so you need to convince individuals not just that they will find the group satisfying and effective but that others will find it so as well; no matter how appealing the promise, there’s no point in being the only user of a social tool.” This problem is complicated by factors such as group size and commitment level. Shirky uses the example of Flickr and Live Journal as ways to subdivide the community to more manageable and creating value to user input in order to attract and retain users.

2.) Tools – This is the “how” problems and coordination will be addressed on every level. Tools are complicated because there is not a panacea type tool that can be used, but rather they must be specific and tailored for particular jobs. Shirky explains that “when you improve the availability of tools, you expand the number of plausible promises in the world.” (266). Shirky uses the comparison of tools to trellises for vines, “they didn’t make the growth possible, but they supported and extended that growth” (266). Group action and selection are also determined by group size and duration of interaction.

3.) Bargain -  This is the rule set, the if you want to use the social tools what you can expect and what is expected of you portion. Bargains come third in the list because they can only come about after the creation of a promise and a working set of tools are in place, but it is the most important. Shirky explains this importance because “it is the least explicit aspect and in part because it is the one the users have the biggest hand in creating, which means it can’t be completely determined in advance.” (270). The bargain is what helps the user determine transaction costs, and will they be balanced or more one sided. But no matter what the bargain is, the end point is that users must agree to it, not only in a contractual manner, but in the user interaction experience. Shirky uses the example of Wikipedia switching from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org to continue the promise of using GFDL to assure users that all content that contribute is free and available to all users and not for profit.
These three things seem easy enough to track, so why can’t there be a secret formula for success? Well, Shirky says that complex interactions social dilemmas complicate this process creating unique social tools thus erasing the idea of a universal formula. Interactions between users complicate all three of these aspects. This can be seen in how users interpret the implicit meaning of the promise, the spectrum of tools use, and accepting and rejection of the evolving bargain. An example of these complex interactions would be as we discussed in the Failure is Free post where we talked about the meet up group Stay at Home Moms. Ultimately, it was user interaction with the promise of meet up (be connected to people with similar interests, defined as stay at home moms), tools (the platform of meet up to exchange advice and ideas), and the bargain (defining user status ranging from posting and sharing ideas, to just visiting the site and reading to find out information) that led to it’s success not anything inherent in the meet up design.
It is this heavy reliance on the user that results in the social dilemmas that arise in all groups. Shirky gives many examples ranging from botched eBay transactions to branching off of the original group topic. This introduces the dilemma of satisfaction vs. effectiveness in groups. Groups must be able to evolve by altering their promise, the tools they use, and revising the bargains in order to maintain user satisfaction and effectiveness. Lastly, I would pose a question to the class. Recently Facebook just reached 350 million users. Founder Mark Zuckerberg recently explained how when Facebook first formed and evolved that it made sense to divide communities by school networks, then regions, and companies. However, Facebook is considering reevaluating these divisions. How do you think this will alter the social network and how will users respond?

In their essays “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online” and “The Hazards of New Online Collectivism” Kevin Kelly and Jaron Lanier present two drastically views of online collectivism. While Kelly embraces online collectivism as the beginning of a new age in global cooperation, Lanier cautions against trusting the wisdom of an anonymous online collective.

In his essay Kelly heralds collaborative web pages as the start of a new, updated form of socialism. Collaborative web pages, such as Wikipedia, allow users to alter the site and depend on their participation. As Clay Skirky points out in Here Comes Everybody “If the people who love Wikipedia all lost interest at the same time, it would have vanished almost instantly” (Shirky 141). Wikipedia needs constant user participation, not only to add and edit articles, but also to stop vandals and special interest groups from deleting controversial articles.
Kelly sees these communal sites, which function based upon the voluntary contributions of their users, as harnessing community action in a new way, leading society towards digital socialism. Unlike traditional socialism, which centers on state control of the economy, digital socialism is “socialism without the state [and]…operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government” (Kelly 2). Unlike the centralized socialism of the past, digital socialism does not operate under any central authority. The Internet allows people to share goods (music, video, programs, etc.), and to work together to produce something (a program, an encyclopedia, etc.). Rather than the government rationing a limited number of items, supplies are free for everyone on the Internet.
Kelly defines this new socialism as “a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sited and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience”(Kelly 2). In this system, large numbers of people work for free and enjoy products free of charge. As in the traditional idea of socialism, people control the means of production and are free to contribute as they wish. As discussed in the previous post entitled “The Ongoing Process of The Social Web” people are driven to work on these projects for a variety of non-monetary reasons, including the desire to do a good thing.

Digital socialism is not an ideology, but a set of tools that allows people to work together, free of charge. These tools enable people to move through four levels of social arrangement: sharing, cooperation, collaboration and collectivism. With each level, the amount of coordination increases.
1)    Sharing: The first level is sharing. People share photos, videos and personal information through a variety of sharing sites including myspace ad youtube.
2)    Cooperation: Individuals work towards a large-scale goal. The products of this work are available to everyone. Many sites harness the cooperative dynamic for a threefold benefit:
-The technology aids the user directly (allowing her to tag, rank and bookmark things for her own use).
- The user benefits from another individual’s tags, bookmarks, etc.
- The project creates additional value that comes from the group as a whole. In this way, collaboration multiplies the power of the individual. While one opinion may be lost, cooperation allows the individual to contribute to a community’s collective influence. This influence can be larger than the members of the group would be able to achieve on their own. On sites like Digg for example, an individual can vote on which links will be displayed more prominently, steering public conversation as much as broadcast media.
3)    Collaboration: Organized collaboration can produce benefits beyond those of casual cooperation. In organized collaboration, highly tuned communal tools harness the work of thousands or tens of thousands of members to create complex, high quality products. Open source software projects are an example of collaborative projects. The contributor will gain only indirect benefits because he will only work on a small part of the project and the completed product may be years away. Rather than gain money for his work, the contributor gains experience and status.
4)    Collectivism: Individuals take responsibility for critical processes and difficult decisions are decided by the group as a whole. Some collectivist organizations can benefit from a hierarchy (such as the elite group of 1,500 editors who do the majority of the editing on Wikipedia) and some can suffer from it (like the internet or facebook).

Kelly heralds this new digital socialism as elevating both the individual and the group at once. All levels of digital cooperation can “enhance creativity, productivity and freedom”, creating things that neither traditional capitalism nor communism could achieve (Yochai Benkler quoted by Kelly on p 6). In his article “The Hazards of New Online Collectivism” Jaron Lanier presents a less optimistic view of online collectivism. He criticizes “a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force”(Lanier 1). He suggests that collaborative Internet technology harness the work of many to create one faceless work, without personality. It is impossible to tell who contributes what so no one is forced to takes responsibility. He suggests that special interest groups and dedicated subcultures can easily sway collaborative projects, like Wikipedia, because they are the only ones willing to put a significant amount of time and effort into these projects. Collaborative sites lack the context and personality that comes with knowing who writes an article.

Blogs and Internet news sites also devalue real reporting. These sites largely react to or copy the work of real reporters. As these sites grow steadily more popular, news agencies (TV, newspapers and magazines) that employ journalists are steadily declining. News is no longer seen as something that you should pay for. Personal, investigative journalism (when a journalist takes responsibility for his work) is declining. This leads to a loss of insight and subtlety and a tendency to enshrine the norm. This makes the hive mind (great masses of people working on or giving their opinions about something) stupid and boring.  American Idol, for example, is the hive mind choosing the next pop star. It is extremely easy to vote for a contestant on American Idol (through calling and text messaging) and many people vote multiple times. This competition enshrines mediocrity, choosing the contestant that is palatable to the most people, not the one who is the most talented. While I do not think that this competition is responsible for the lack of great American musicians in popular music, as Lanier implies, it certainly doesn’t help. According to Lanier, the opinions and work of the masses can be useful only when taste and judgment don’t matter, when no personal flair is required. The work of the masses and the individual must be balanced. A strong press, with reporters who take responsibility for their work must inform the collective for their opinions to be of value. Lanier contradicts Kelly, suggesting that empowering the collective takes power away from the individual.

I found Lanier’s article to be overly cynical. It is true that the individual should be valued and that the collective should not be blindly trusted. However, online tools, not only empower the hive mind, but also allow unprecedented opportunities for collectivism and cooperation. Through the Internet, people can work together to create something that they could never achieve on their own. It also provides millions of people with free access to tools, media and information. I remain optimistic and think that digital socialism can change the way that we view society. Perhaps we will grow accustomed to working and receiving goods for free, moving us towards a more socialist society. What do you guys think? Is collaboration on the Internet a force for good (as Kelly and Shirky suggest) or is it dumbing us down (as s Lanier suggests)?

In his article, Kelly describes the communal function of digital culture, its collectivism, as a new form of socialism. This is because the digital exchanges are centered around social interaction, not ideology as the term “socialism” evokes at first glance. Kelly terms it “a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world” (Kelly 1). It is characterized by an interaction that- as we have learned in discussing networks previously- relies heavily on a widespread connectivity of individuals; the eventual ability to “connect everyone to everyone” (Kelly 1). It is the force dubbed “dot-communism” by John Barlow in the 1990s, derived of “free agents” and a lack of owned property (Kelly 1). Since the Internet functions as a global platform, this new socialism produces a world-wide egalitarian environment. The implementation of the Creative Commons alternative copy right liscence and the proliferation of file sharing have aided this growing communal digital landscape.

Kelly calls upon the ideas of one of our class mascots, Clay Shirky, to explain the development and phases of interactivity online. These ideas can be broken down into four layers:

• I. Sharing- Examples of sharing take place on sites like Loopt, which shares your location, Youtube, where users can post videos and on Yelp!, where individuals can express opinions on local businesses (possibly affecting the ideas of the researcher).
• II. Cooperation- At this level we have sites like Digg, that can be influenced by the voting power of its users.
• III. Collaboration- Open source software and the Apache web server are examples of digital media that allow for collaboration. As discussed in class previously, open source software is the epitome of this egalitarian, socialism that Kelly is describing. After all, the contributions it accepts can virtually be from anyone, from anywhere. As a result of adding to a project, communication and essentially, socializing, take place.
• IV. Collectivism- Kelly describes collectivism as the ability “to engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are decided by all participants” (Kelly 3) While he praises Wikipedia for partaking in such a format, Kelly admits that Wikipedia is not at a collective ideal. Those with the power to edit still make up a much smaller population compared to those contributing. He goes on to say that  ”some types of collectives benefit from hierarchy while others are hurt by it” (Kelly 3). It seems the roles in these collective communities are a bit flexible, dependent on the organization.

As Kelly explains, the aim of digital socialism is “to maximize both individual autonomy and the power of people working together”, not necessarily to favor either side (Kelly 3). This idea is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Network. Open source software and the power of collectivity is clearly growing. As Ohloh records, there are 250,000 people working for free on 275,000 projects.With examples like Kiva, a peer to peer lending site, individuals have the ability to help total strangers. Providing such humanitarian examples as this, Kelly presents collectivism to be entirely positive and even possibly moral.

However, Jaron Lanier finds fault in collectivity, particularly in our willingness to trust in it as an authority. Lanier begins his piece by explaining the tug of war he played with Wikipedia editors, when trying to correct his own page. “I’m turned into a filmmaker again”, he writes of Wikipedia’s response to his corrections (Lanier 3). Little did the editors know that this identity is inaccurate. I feel like here there is a great tension between Kelly’s idea and Lanier’s: that tension is in the relationship of the user to the Wikipedia. To Kelly, it would seem that individuals are creating the outward manifestations that are on Wikipedia, yet, to Lanier it’s as if the Wikipedia is producing us, our identities. He is quite concerned with what elements he feels are lost in the transaction of collectivism, one important one being individual voice. “A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning” (Lanier 5). Lanier also criticizes collectivism for allowing a disjointed aesthetic. These visual and personal cues are wrongfully lost from the Wikipedia, to Lanier. However, to an extent, I would imagine that Shirky would disagree with this point that Lanier makes. To him, contributing to the Wikipedia is putting our mark on the world (Reason #2 for contributing to Wikipedia, Shirky 132). Though it may not be recognizable to all that encounter your post, you would know that those are your words. Is that enough?

Lanier criticizes Wikipedia also for the way that it is so highly esteemed: “how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly” (Lanier 4). In the article from  Nature that he mentions, Wikipedia is even reported as being more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm (Lanier 4). Here, we witness what Lanier might call a competition over who is more “Meta”: more collectively wise, more all-knowing and whose identity encompasses all others. He also finds our willingness to  believe in the authority of these Meta-mindful sites problematic. He notes “an increased tendency to enshrine the official or normative beliefs of an organization” as a result of wikis and Meta-sites  (Lanier 10). In this regard, he likens American Idol to the Wikipedia, claiming they are both at fault for the centrality (Lanier 10). However, Kelly claims that this new form of socialism ”is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme” (Kelly 1). Clearly there is a conflict between their ideas, particularly on this particular notion.

Though Lanier does criticize the Wikipedia and “hive mind” formation, he does mention the strength of the collective when it comes to answering its own questions, particularly numeric ones. However, he does also suggest the importance of individuals for quality control on the content. His emphasis on the power of the individual is key to his concept: “Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals” (Lanier 13). Whereas Kelly may suggest that the individual becomes empowered by assisting the collective, Lanier would strongly disagree and sees the transfer of power as exactly reverse.

Below I have included a screen capture of Jaron Lanier’s Wikipedia page. It says that he is a “visual artist”, though I’m not sure if that is his doing…since I cannot sense his voice in the entry.

Related Posts from our Class:

http://idm09.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/the-group-work-thats-wikipedia

http://idm09.wordpress.com/tag/a-m-turing/

http://idm09.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/failure-is-free/

Both Kevin Kelly and Jaron Lanier take on the continuous debate about the effects of open source websites in the articles “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online” and “Digital Maoism”.  Kelly see’s the rise of open sources in an optimistic light whereas Lanier does not.  Websites where individuals are free to contribute to the overall product has become so powerful that it is beginning to re-shape the way our society operates.  A few examples of open source websites are Wikipedia, Digg, and You-Tube.

Kelly describes this new collectivism as a “revised version of socialism” (1). This new kind of socialism can be seen as a digital socialism that operates in the absence of a government and in its place is the realm of economics and culture.  Society is changing in that “instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds.  Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops – Instead of national production, we have peer production.  Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods” (Kelly 1).  While the word socialism can take on a diverse group of meanings, Kelly points out that he does not intend for this type of socialism to take on an ideological viewpoint.  What he does mean is that the rise in open source websites has laid the groundwork for “A spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation.  It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space of innovation” (Kelly 2).

Kelly mentions Clay Shirky in his article, illustrating his four hierarchal descriptions of the new online phenomenon we are dealing with.  The first level is sharing which is the mildest form but it operates as the foundation for the more coordinated levels of socialism.  This is the level of picture sharing on websites like Facebook or Flickr or video sharing on You Tube.  The second level he calls cooperation.  At this level a group of individuals work towards a larger goal like the formation of a 3D picture from numerous individuals snapshots of one object. Shirky defines the third level as collaboration.  It is in this level that “finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members” (Kelly 2).  Here, participants do not really see direct benefits instead they gain status, enjoyment, and credit.  The last level he calls collectivism.  At this level, a system is created where particular people take on the responsibility of important processes.  “The elite core we find at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless socialism can work on a grand scale” (Kelly 2).

By and large, Kelly looks at the rise of open sources as perhaps the newest American innovation.  Overall he sees this new phenomenon as a success because of its low-cost and omnipresent collaboration.  This new model of sharing and contributing in Kelly’s mind is more powerful and beneficial than ever imagined.

While Kelly’s arguments are persuasive, so are Jaron Lanier’s.  Lanier illustrates his negative views on websites like Wikipedia in his article “Digital Maoism”.  He compares Wikipedia to a bible, not in Wikipedia’s actual intentions but the way it has come to be viewed and used.  He goes as far as saying this open source frenzy can be seen as “the race to erase personality”.  Websites like Wikipedia have gained importance rapidly, and are being viewed as all-knowing, which has become ongoing pattern for online collectivism.  Lanier views text accuracy in websites only one of the important elements for a collective to be successful.  For him, a collective also needs what he calls personality. Language offers its full meaning only when one can sense personality along with the information being transmitted.  A website Lanier views as successful in this aspect is My Space because it allows for personality and does not “pretend to be all-wise” (Lanier 4).  While Lanier discourages websites like Wikipedia, he does not deny the potential of a collective.  What he mainly argues is that open source websites have gone on this trend of losing the “scent” of individuality for a more “Meta” approach.

Lanier believes if handled and operated correctly, a collective can be powerful and persuasive.  Our problem, according to Lanier, is that we have not found the correct balance between personality and factual information.  Collectivism to Lanier does offer intelligence, a special kind of intelligence that cannot be displayed by individuals.  He concludes in his article that some answers should be handled by a collective whereas others are better off in the hands of individuals.  Both Kelly and Lanier spark good arguments in the debate about online collectivism and offer different ways to look at popular websites of our time and the impacts to come.

Furthermore, the article titled “The Shift to Social Communication”  on our Digital Media Blog can offer some of the kinds of impacts online collectivism is currently having.  Clay Shirky illustrates the shift in the media environment by the use of new social technologies.  According to Shirky, media has become much more social and it works to allow society to adopt new behaviors.  In this case, the change in society’s behaviors as a result of collectivism is what is up for debate between Kelly and Lanier.

In Bauwens article, “The Social Web and its Social Contracts”, he explains the social web in terms of social sharing. He claims that “we appreciate the facilitation of the sharing processes and we understand that operating such platforms comes with a cost, and with an expectation of profitability.” In other words, as internet users we have come to understand that in order for these sites to operate and permit the culture of sharing, there must be some sort of business model or monetary system that supports the platform. Though there are many commons-based sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist that do not accept advertising, places like Google and YouTube employ “benefit sharing” as a way for their users to “create social wealth” while the platforms “monetize” the content shared. Bauwens’ entire explanation seems to be a bit complicated for the ending point that he eventually arrives at in the end where he states it is likely that “peer to peer will be the dominant logic of value creation, and that this value creation of immaterial value, will take the form of an abundant and reproducible commons of open knowledge.” Basically, the social web is leading us down a path where most communities on the Internet will be mostly “open-source” and adhering to the same logic of the previously discussed GPL. The social communities and relationships that we form in reality will soon transcend into the virtual realm where the collaborations and participation by users all over the world will create “a commons of open knowledge.” This prediction is highly evident in the instance of the incredible power behind the shared logic of a site like Wikipedia.

Shirky’s discussion of Wikipedia was truly quite intriguing in that I never really realized how our previous discussions from the past few weeks of class on the power law distribution (i.e. on social network sites and the hierarchy of the internet) would come into play in a setting like that of the Wiki. As explained on page 124, “the power law distribution occurs in social settings where some set of items – users, pictures, tags – is ranked by frequency of occurrence.” This ecosystem of sharing therefore relies on those who contribute the most edits per article in terms of the 80/20 rule. The user that adds the most to the article, (let’s use good ol’ SCEhardt the asphalt expert as an example), will be far more active than the average contributor. This “predictable imbalance” should not be looked at as a negative thing however; instead, we should use this imbalance to understand its necessity in understanding the “behavior of the collective” users of Wikipedia (Shirky 128). The site is a commons of individual actions that make up an ongoing systematic process of improvement. The Wiki-ecosystem does not need to rely on a division of labor, the “necessary laziness” of the contributors appreciate the amount of freedom they have to improve the site and therefore are driven to the eventual individual action of even adding a single edit to a topic of their desire. People simply just want to make a mark on the world and be part of something and Wikipedia allows this to occur. The non-financial motivation to do a good thing and contribute just makes you feel good inside! Someone out there is definitely going to appreciate your extremely random fact about three-toed sloths in Peru.

The ideas of Shirky and Bauwens meet when Wikipedia and its community of Wikipedians in terms of the potential vandalism that has occurred (and currently occurs on a regular basis) on the site. The fact that Wikipedia has yet to be “destroyed” signals that the community of Wikipedians that work so hard on a 24/7 basis to maintain the site and its accuracy adheres to a particular social contract that dictates that when people care enough about something, “they come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible” (Shirky 142). People care about Wikipedia and the information on there – they do not want false information about celebrities and they do not want fake facts about the population of puppies in U.S. homes. People rely on Wikipedia as a reference site, for better or for worse, and they will continue to rely on the communal “love” of Wikipedia as a “building material” that will serve to impart information for many more years to come. I mean, come on, there’s even an app for that.

(*** Any iPhone/iPod Touch users interested in the Wikipedia app – go and download it from the app store – it’s free and actually pretty cool with a neat article of the day!)

In his article, “The Social Web and it’s Social Contracts”, Michael Bauwens talks about how the basis for the web and many of its uses, such as chatrooms and blogs, are built on a underlying social contract that according to him is actually quite stable, even if it is somewhat implied and there are not any real written rules per se. Bauwens believes that internet users allow themselves to have their “attention to be monetized through advertising” because we enjoy the facilities of the internet so much and understand that it is in a sense the fair trade that we must give to use the qualities of the internet that we so value. Bauwens also says though, that we will only permit this fair exchange if it does not stop the ease with which we use the facilities of the Internet that we so enjoy and if that exchange does interrupt our favorite qualities of the Internet we as a society of Internet users will revolt and move elsewhere.

In chapter 5 of “Here Comes Everybody”, Clay Shirkey talks also about social web and the contracts that are in a way inherent within the Internet. Shirky specifically talks about Wikipedia and how it affects the notion of social contracts on the web. Nupedia was the original idea for Wikipedia or behind Wikipedia, however Nupedia failed, paving the way for Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s success may be due to fixing part of the reason that Nupedia failed. Nupedia had an extremely long review process by the owners of the website before posts were approved. Wikipedia has extremely quick updates by users and very little review process, which has also been the subject of complaints as well as admiration. Complaints often stem from the notion that early on in Wikipedia’s popularity, it was often thought of as being extremely faulty because of the little amount of review that each post was submitted to. Wikipedia was orignally created by the inventors of Nupedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, wanted to create a free version of the higher end Nupedia. Wikipedia eventually became much more successful.

The name Wikipedia comes from the idea of Wiki’s which were small user-edited sites that were originally conceived and created in the mid 1990’s. The creator felt that users would want to have the control of editing and that they would innately trust others with the editing process. Namely one’s peers. After originally using wiki’s to work on rough drafts for Nupedia, Sanger and Wales gave wikipedia is own address and the site blew up, far surpassing the site visits and power of Nupedia. Wikipedia is completely user generated and controlled. A person can decide to create an entry for something, that is edited by peers of course, and then further entries are created off that. Thus the notion of a wikipedia race mentioned in other posts is created. According to Shirky, Wikipedia is able to “aggregate individual and often tiny contributions, hundreds of millions of them annually, made by millions of contributors, all performing different functions” (Shirkey 118). Wikipedia entries are a shared work. Everyone contributes on them and they are never fully done. Each person adds or edits it using what they know or what information they have links to. In this way it is a truly collaborative group project, which works because the users actually have to care about the “product” that is being turned out. For me, it would seem surprising that Wikipedia has been successful as it has been, maybe it is just the skeptic in me but, I would feel that there are enough people out there that don’t really care to make the information unreliable. But apparently, the participants are extremely committed to the outcomes, as Shirky would say.

Chapter 5 in Here Comes Everybody is titled “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production” and in it Shirkey talks about Wikipedia. Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger “as an experimental offshoot of their original idea, a free online encyclopedia of high quality called Nupedia” (Shirkey 109). Nupedia was to be written, managed, and reviewed by experts in their spare time. Nupedia ultimately failed. One reason it failed was because a submission had to go through a lengthy process of review and revision through an advisory board.

The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1995. Wikis are user-editable websites. Proofreaders weren’t necessary because Cunningham assumed that “groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust one another” (Shirkey 111). Every wiki page is a total sum of all accumulated changes.

Sanger and Wales put up a test wiki on Nupedia as a way to create rough drafts. This made it a lot easier to create initial versions of articles, but also angered the advisory board because they felt their jobs to oversee the process of creating articles was being insulted. A few days after this Sanger and Wales moved the wiki off of Nupedia and gave it its own URL www.Wikipedia.com .  After just a few weeks Wikipedia past Nupedia in total number of articles and by the end of the year Wikipedia had 15,000 articles and was continuing to grow. This showed that Wikipedia was viable and Nupedia wasn’t. Wikipedia wasn’t around to make revenue so to cement this the URL was changed to Wikipedia.org.

Wikipedia works with a spontaneous division of labor. Here it means that Wikipedia is able to “aggregate individual and often tiny contributions, hundreds of millions of them annually, made by millions of contributors, all performing different functions” (Shirkey 118). A person will decide to make an article about something and then slowly other people will add different things to the article whether it’s new information or correcting typos. Each edit can be as big or as small as the user wants. Each Wikipedia article is a process and because of this they are never finished.

Wikipedia thrives because the users care. Wikis reward people who invest in improving them. If no one cared about Wikipedia it would die. Since a group of people care they work together and keep their collective work alive and prospering. Wikis “provide ways for groups to work together and to defend the output of that work, but these capabilities are available only when most of the participants are committed to those outcomes” (Shirkey 137). Seeing how popular Wikipedia is I think it’s safe to say that people are committed on the work done on Wikipedia articles. What makes Wikipedia a success can be seen in this post. People who edit articles don’t have to be experts in what they’re editing. This was one of the downfalls of Nupedia.

Michael Bauwens in his article “The Social Web and its Social Contracts” discusses how the social web is based on an underlying, but stable social contract. This social has the users saying “we appreciate the facilitation of the sharing processes, and we understand that operating such platforms comes with a cost, and with an expectation of profitability. We therefore allow our attention to be monetized through advertising, as long as it does not interfere with our sharing. If the interference crosses a certain line of acceptability, we will either revolt, or go elsewhere” (Bauwens). I think Wikipedia would fit in the 2^nd part of the article where Bauwens talks about how attention economy benefits the platform owners. The fact that Wikipedia is a success had to have benefit the owners somehow. They don’t make a profit or have ads on the site and the people contributing to the articles don’t make any money either, but I’m sure the attention the site gets has benefitted the platform owners in other ways.

In chapter 10 of Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky discusses the logic of publish-then-filter than has emerged from the evolution of the open source system. This new method has been enabled by the idea of “failure for free”. Shirky explains this using the success of Stay At Home Moms (in chapter 8 of his book). Like any group formed on the Web, every Meetup group faces the problem of balancing specificity and size. In other words, each group wants to create a sense of local community and shared interest without being too general or too specific. An ideal group would exist right in between the generic and the specific—something achieved by the Stay At Home Moms (which can be demonstrated by the success of the group). How was this achieved? Did Meetup know that this would be such a big hit? The process of such group formation is actually quite ironic. Meetup uses an untraditional methodology in which they “do best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another (Shirky, 235). This seems to be reversed customer service—doing the least possible to serve the users, and instead leaving it up to the users/consumers to communicated and serve themselves. This leaves much room for failure as one may predict. Most groups fail due to a lack of interest by users (too generic, too specific, too boring). The user’s judgement is highly valued because the rise of groups is not a business decision, but a by-product of user behavior. As Shirky writes, “Meetup is succeeding not in spite of the failed groups, but because of the failed groups” (236). This is simply because failure is free. Through trial-and-error systems such as Meetup, successful groups such as Stay At Home Mom are born.
This form of experimentation began with software programmers. Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds, who wanted a free operating system that would utilize voluntary contributions and user participation. This initial proposal by Torvalds launched the idea of collaborative “open source” software. This open source software (OSS) has been one of the most influential developments of the digital age. Open source programs are “freely available and more importantly freely improvable” (244).

A key point that Shirky makes is that open social systems work because open systems lower the cost of failure and they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea. Most traditional organizations try to reduce the likelihood of failure to avoid repercussion costs by choosing the “steady performer” over “brilliant but erratic” (250). On the other hand, the open source movement is an “ecosystem” in which failure is free. Cheap failure allows exploration of many more possibilities or “fitness landscapes” (for any problem there is a vast area of possibilities to explore but few valuable spots within to discover). Therefore, the cost of filtering versus publishing have reversed. Now, trying something new is often times less costly than deciding whether it is worth to try a certain thing.
Competitors such as Microsoft point out that the kernel of Linux is done by only a handful of people and discredits the idea of the open source system that there are hundreds of people contributing to the system. But Shirky expalins why this is not problematic to the open source society. Whereas an additional contributer at a traditional organization will use up resources, there is no such overhead management in an open source system who needs to worry about the scarcity of resources. Microsoft’s attack is pretty easy to negate if we look at the success of Wikipedia versus the flop of Microsoft’s Encarta. Encarta did not utilize user contributions that Wikipedia bases its success on.

Shirky makes the final point that open source systems work because there is genuine support from the community and not just commercial support (for a specific example read pages 256-259 about AT&T vs. Perl). The secret of the open source ecosystem is the shared interest—the idea that “communal can be at least as durable as the commercial” (259).
The philosophical commitment to freedom through OSS in Shirky’s article is directly tied to the argument of source code as speech formed by Gabriella Coleman. Coleman discusses the strong commitment of the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) society to “redefine the meaning of liberal freedom, property, and software by asserting in new ways that code is speech” (1). Richard Stallman, who founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) created Free Software, which unlike proprietary software, could be copied, shared, and modified without cost. In these systems, no one is really paid and voluntarily contributes to the developments of the organization. Growing copyright laws and patent laws seem to limit the distribution and sharing of F/OSS projects, show in the arrests of Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov. The former was arrested for unlocking a DVD’s DRM to play movies on Linux computers and the latter was arrested for unlocking Adobe’s e-book access controls. To programmers, these arrests violated the First Amendment and only showed the continual monopolization of big businesses. Coleman writes, “ Hackers, programmers, and computer scientists continue to be motivated to transform what is now their cultural reality—a rival liberal morality—into a broader legal one by arguing that source code should be protectable speech under the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of other nations” (29).

These ideas can be linked to last week’s reading on Facebook. There is a lack of privacy, but this lack of privacy is the most vital form of the open source society that allows the success Facebook. The MIP works on a basis of persuasive experience and the success of Facebook can be attributed to the success of the six components of the Facebook Platform in determining which approaches and options create the most popular feedback. Facebook is able to apply method of trial-and-error because of the open source system by which failure is free.