lovehistory.net

As Scott noted in his blog entry, I am one of the presenters this week, and like him my blog post will reflect that, mostly because I want to save my own answers to some of the questions I/we plan to pose for class discussion. That said, I did once again find the readings this week to be both interesting and engaging. The choice of an article from Wired seemed especially apt for our crowd-sourcing theme, and our theme of exploring how academia and the web interact. It’s a nontraditional source that still provides an informative look at the history of crowd-sourcing. I found the discussion of VH1’s attempt to mine the internet for programing to be especially interesting, especially considering that this phenomenon continues to this day in the form of the show Tosh.0 on Comedy Central. I’ve only seen it one time and felt completely disinterested, mostly because I’d seen all the clips on the internet already and also because it provided me no means of interacting with it other than talking to the person on my right or maybe my dog is no one else was around.

Traditional media is not necessarily the best vehicle for this kind of digitally born and disseminated content, in part because television does not allow the viewer to interact with it in the same way the internet does – the viewer remains passive. On the website Reddit, which I know I name-check constantly, the content is exclusively user driven. Any user can submit any content (to an endless variety of user created subreddits), and the submissions are then ranked based on up votes or down votes, once again, all given by users of the site. The only qualification is that you must have an account with the site, however, all that’s needed to sign up in an email address. The most popular links, as determined by user vote, move up the list and eventually appear on the front page of their subreddit and/or the main page of the site, attracting an untold number of views along the way. Many, if not all, of the videos from Tosh.0 appeared first on Reddit, and the site is adept at both capturing and creating viral videos.

Reddit has been around since 2005, but it’s only been in the last few years that the website has exploded. One reason it’s so successful, I believe, is its focus on egalitarian participation. Further, when videos or other media go viral (or become memes), Reddit’s users more often than not take them and modify them, then redistribute the modified content through Reddit and other social media networks, which not only popularizes the originating content, but creates a genre of mimics and pastiche that often provide implicit or explicit commentary on the originating meme. Further, the comments section of the site allows registered users to discuss memes and other submissions, or to simply read these comments (even non-registered users can view the comments thread). This user-driven experience and allowance or even encouragement of user participation is what drives Reddit.

Another interesting feature of Reddit is the self-moderating nature of the site. Users are often in charge of moderating subreddits, and further, the upvote/downvote system is a reflection in many cases of Reddit users’ dedication to the scientific method, fact-finding, and fact-checking. When Reddit started, I remember it being dominated by political and science-driven content, but as its user base has exploded memes have come to dominate the front page. Users, however, are vigilant in policing each other, to the point that they have become fact checkers of all media they encounter and feel noteworthy. Reddit users have learned they have the power to interact with traditional media (most often news media) in order to affect the story and even circumvent traditional media channels to read out directly to the subjects of the stories. This interaction can take the form of lending aid or revealing falsehood or perceived wrongdoing, to the point where people feel loved and saved or harassed and victimized. Redditors can be ruthless in their missions to make an impact in real life. Reddit can even be the originator of media content – they have the power to make stars by uniting around a common cause or person and creating a noteworthy audience to the point that traditional media companies often recognize Reddit’s contribution.

So why did I present you with so much information about this site? Reddit is just one incredibly powerful example of what can happen when users are allowed to drive content. Just like any society they have created a community with rules and a mindset that has developed a mostly coherent idea of this community’s mission in the world. Reddit has garnered so much attention that traditional news media is beginning to acknowledge the community’s role in the world, and Anderson Cooper even felt the need to police Reddit by drawing attention to the controversial r/jailbait subreddit, since deleted as a result of his story which pointed out redditor’s often hypocritical behavior in terms of acting as moral police while ignoring their own sometimes doubtable practices. Reddit’s emphasis on free speech can become an escape from what society has deemed to be unacceptable, but sometimes the community forgets that their are reasons limits are placed on certain actions.

Because that can be the problem with these kinds of sites, as with any group. Its values and actions reflect those of its users. Reddit is demographically skewed as (young, white) male, with an emphasis on those from Western countries. Users also on average have at least some college education (Wikipedia). While this would perhaps explain Reddit’s above the board interest in science, politics, and rigorous fact checking, it also results in a website devoid of minority opinions. Reddit is a boy’s club, and when posts by or about women make the front page, it is often because the contents present them as sexual objects. Users who have objections to these depictions are often the subject of sometimes brutal criticism and then downvoted to oblivion. But this phenomenon is not unknown to us – it’s a reflection of the culture we’re raised in, another reason reddit is an interesting beast to participate in and study. Why minorities aren’t a larger presence on the site is an interesting point of investigation.

This brings me back to Roy Rosenzweig’s article about our role in policing websites such as Wikipedia. Both Reddit and Wikipedia have their own mechanisms for self-correction, but the in the case of Reddit especially, if the site’s user base is skewed and perhaps overtly or latently hostile to those who have different views, these sites then become (perhaps dangerously) limited in the kind of content they are willing to present. I believe that is perhaps part of why Roy put forward the idea that academics, instead of fighting Wikipedia, should instead begin attempting to contribute themselves. The question becomes then: how do we reach users who aren’t participating? The Smithsonian article shows that in many cases it’s best not to fight user-driven content but instead make use of existing technologies to disseminate material and messages to users who have already decided (as a group) what content distribution tools they’re willing to work with. But how to we create spaces for alternatives either within these communities or without? And further, how do we learn to let go of our material in an age when user participation is so largely driven by the user’s expectation that they will be allowed to interact actively with content, which may include modifying it? Also, most of these articles didn’t dwell too long on the importance of interface and useability in the enduring popularity of these websites, which strikes me as a noteworthy oversight.

I hope we’ll touch on some of these themes in our discussion today.