Seduction Of The Swarm: Understanding patterns of online participation

Seduction of the SwarmUnderstanding patterns of online participation

HelloUniversity of Maryland College Park

SousveillanceLifecasting as grassroots surveillance

What’s the big deal?It’s like firing up all the light bulbs at once.

That “Web 2.0” ideaWeb 1.0 = Browsing (passive)

Web 2.0 = Participating (active)

Collective Intelligence“the capacity of a human community to evolve toward higher order complexity thought, problem-solving and integration

through collaboration and innovation.” - George Por

On Coordinationthe folksonomy example

TaxonomyDewey Decimal System: Religion

• 292 Classical

• 293 Germanic religion

• 294 Indic origin

• 295 Zoroastrianism

• 296 Judaism

• 297 Islam

• 298 Not assigned

• 299 Other religions

• … What about Buddhism?

Taxonomy

• From the Greek verb:tassein = "to classify”nomos = law, science, "economy"

• The science of classifying things

• Hierarchical tree-like structure

• Requires planning and expertise

Folksonomyhow photo tagging works

Folksonomyphotos tagged as “gadget”

Source: http://www.librarything.com/tagcloud.php

Folksonomytagcloud of LibraryThing’s books

Folksonomy• Folksonomy = folk + taxonomy

• Open, democratic form of organization

• Tags bridge structure and meaning

• Tags reflect the social fabric

• “It’s like 90% of a ‘proper’ taxonomy but 10 times simpler” (Butterfield, 2004)

On Cooperationthe wiki example

FluWikithe bird flu pandemic

The New PR / Wikipublic relations industry wiki

What is a Wiki?• The first Wiki, WikiWikiWeb, was created by Ward

Cunningham in 1995

• Named after Hawaiian bus service, Wiki Wiki

• “The simplest online database that could possibly work” - Ward

• Allows users to easily create and edit Web pages using any Web browser

• Encourages democratic use of Web

• Source: http://wiki.org/wiki.cgi?WhatIsWiki

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

• Among 42 entries tested in both encyclopedias, the difference in accuracy was not great.

• On the topical area of science:

• Wikipedia had 4 inaccuracies

• Britannica had 3 inaccuracies

On Cognitionthe wisdom of the crowds example

Wisdom of the Crowds

• Francis Galton's surprise that the crowd at a county fair accurately guessed the weight of an ox when their individual guesses were averaged

• The average was closer to the ox's true butchered weight than the estimates of most crowd members, and also closer than any of the separate estimates made by cattle experts

Wisdom of the Crowds

• Marketocracy.com’s community of 60,000 online stock traders tracks the decisions of its top 100 portfolios to set the investment strategy for its mutual fund.

• Its index has outperformed the S&P 500 in 11 of the past 17 quarters.

Benefits of Participation• collective intelligence - collaborative

• transparent - instant gratification

• non-hierarchical - democratic

• potential for passion - ownership

• open to public - reputation

• permanence - searchable resource

What make online communities unique?

Motivations of the Gift Economy

• ReciprocityThe most anticipated factor that motivates people to give.

• ReputationThe willingness to help others can all work to increase one's prestige in a community.

• Sense of EfficacyThe feeling an individual has that makes them feel that they have some effect on the environment around them.

• NeedOne may produce and contribute a public good for the simple reason that a person or the groups as a whole has a need for it.

• AttachmentThe commitment one has to the group, one’s utility.

• Side-effectPrivate behavior makes cost of sharing near zero.

Nature of Digital Goods

• In an online community, the setting is a network of digital information.

• Possible to produce an infinite number of perfect copies of a piece of information.

• Information is being produced in a deeply interwoven network of actors.

Nature of Public Goods

• IndivisibleA person's consumption of the good does not reduce the amount available to another. e.g. watching fireworks display

• Non-excludableWhen it is difficult to exclude individuals from benefiting from the good. e.g. national defense system

• In most cases a public good will exhibit these two qualities to some degree only; pure public goods are the exception.

Digital + Public Goods

• Information or “digital goods” are uniquely suited to be exchanged in a gift economy

• “Pure indivisibility” – my use of information does not reduce your ability to use

• Information on the internet becomes a “public good”

But wait...What qualities enable some web services

to be more pervasive than others?

Using Game Mechanics• “Applying Games Mechanics To

Functional Software” by Amy Jo Kim, Creative Director of ShuffleBrain

• Five Game Mechanics1. Collecting2. Earning Points3. Feedback4. Exchanges5. Customization

On Ambient Intimacy

• Leisa Reichelt coined the term “ambient intimacy”

• Describes the genre of social computing apps led by Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce.

• Refers to the constant sense of closeness users feel with their circle of friends through technologies that informally reveal us to each other.

On Walled Gardens• A social network service focuses

on the building and verifying of online social networks for communities of people who share interests and activities

• Most traditional social networking sites are “walled gardens” (e.g. Facebook)

• Trap user content to derive ad revenue

• Can’t leave? Loss of coordination.

On Futuresocial cyborg = the human platform

Doomfirst person shooter + cinema-verite

Strange Dayspersonal experiences for sale

Gordon Bell of Microsoft(memory prosthetic)

Steve Mannworld’s first known cyborg

Jennifer Ringley (JenniCam)1996 - 2003

Justin Kan (justin.tv)lifecasting goes commercial

Testing wearable video over EVDO...(Samsung EVDO phone, Sony Vaio UX, Logitech cam)

ZaoBao newspaper(July 2007)

On Youwhat do you want to know?