Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Due to some inaccurate information being published on Wikipedia, over the next week editors have been charged with finding a way to balance the open-access immediacy of user-generated content and accuracy. Yesterday’s BBC article about Wikipedia’s potential change says founder Jimmy Wales is pushing to have all content reviewed by an editor before it is posted. Other articles are suggesting only registered users’ content will post immediately and unregistered user posts will need to be reviewed. Either way, it is an interesting turn. This brings Wikipedia one step closer to the system Britannica designed while still allowing users to generate the actual article.

Another way to share information is Google’s knol, now in beta. In this knowledge scenario authors have their names out there associated with the work but with more of an srticle-style knowledge-share rather than an encyclopedic entry. Like wikipedia, you can access revisions (history) to see changes—but being from Google, you also have statistics in the sidebar of every article including author information, article activity, user ratings of the content, similar articles or sites, licensing information, and links to other articles by the author.

In knol the author sets the level of editing allowed by other logged-in Google users—from open editing where anyone can participate in the changes, moderated collaboration for suggestions to be sent to the author for approval, or closed collaboration which only allows co-authors to make changes. This feature alone makes knol a more friendly place for a variety of users. Whereas wikipedia’s default is open editing to all and Britannica’s default is closed until approved—authors from both camps can publish their work in knol, and even authors who want nothing to do with participatory editing can offer up their knowledge to the public.

Interested in sharing something you know? Knol is hosting a knol for Dummies contest through March accepting “how to” articles.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Britannica is allowing users to edit and post entries to its online encyclopedia to combat wikipedia, but with a twist of the old-school integrated: user content must be reviewed by Britannica before it will be placed beside entries and posts can only be submitted by approved authors who register their real names and addresses.

Wikipedia is a controversial concept with complaints ranging from false information to cultural decline. But despite the criticism it is still in the top 10 sites used globally.

Perhaps it is also controversy that fuels the site—not controversy over whether the information is accurate or if anonymous authors are credible, but the inclusion of controversial information. James Loewen‘s book Lies My Teacher Told Me points to the whitewashing of (high-school) history as one of the key ingredients to making it boring. Pretending that everything was one-sided and heroes were only ever perfect ignores the drama of life. One of the brilliant sides to wikipedia is the ability to allow different cultures, viewpoints, and opinions to be expressed in the writing of history. As Danah Boyd mentioned in her speech at the 2008 Handheld Learning conference, teachers could choose to use wikipedia as a learning tool by accessing the history of entries and teaching students to evaluate the credibility of authors.

Britannica’s emulation of the wikipedia format is a big step, even with the restrictions. In fact, the restrictions directly address the major complaints heard about the wikipedia format, and by creating an alternative that emphasizes the expert while allowing for restricted user interaction Britannica may be bringing the idea of interactive technology to a new set of users.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Typically I see advertising as an invasion. It might be that the volume goes up, the aesthetics are not pleasing to me, and often the messages themselves flop in their attempts to be rad.

In one of the archived presentations by Dana Boyd that I watched, she said the MySpace users she interacts with had a completely different reaction to advertising: It was a sign of stability. They were more confident that sponsored sites/tools/tech would stick around while the free and ad-free offerings were somewhat shunned for fear that they would disappear.

JPG Magazine all but disappeared. It has a bit of a torrid past, drama among the owners and a flood of user loss in response. But overall the concept of an online community contributing and rough editing the content of a print publication is a great one. Which is why, despite the drama and changes already past, I was happy to hear the magazine would be bought out instead of folding. The active community was credited with saving the magazine due to all of the hype generated after the closure was announced.

And today when I went to the site and saw an ad about how to lose 2 pounds of your stomach fat ... that first twinge of disgust reminded me of the potential for stability ... 

I can fly through keyboard hot keys by rote ... until I opt to change software or update the programs I work with daily. Today I decided to switch to Firefox from Camino because of Zotero, a citation/resource/note managing application that looks astounding. If it lives up to half of what it appears to be I am going to be so happy I won’t mind reprogramming the hot keys in my brain. So far the biggest difference between Camino and Firefox is that home is no longer apple+H but instead option+home—but the home key on my laptop is fn+left arrow ... so a simple two-key stroke has turned into a two-handed, extended fingers project.

Friday, January 09, 2009

The psychological sense of community: Prospects for a community psychology by Seymour B. Sarason

In Sarason’s overview he mentions that having close friends scattered throughout the country or world can make one feel even more acutely that a (local) sense of community is lacking. Written in 1974—before access to email, blogs, photo and video sharing, etc—I have to think that the disconnect today would be different.

Most of my friends and family are scattered throughout the world. I take this as a great opportunity to travel and visit, while keeping in touch through media between visits. We have kept in touch with email, phone calls, text messages, digital photos, blogs, mailed and posted movies, art, online web chats with audio and video … My family and friends being thousands of miles away didn’t make me feel a lack of community in the area I lived. If anything, they became a part of where I lived through our mediated connections, and I was equally aware of what was going on in their physical communities. Yet we also had private and public communities where we could interact that were not limited to the places we lived. If the connections to remote communities replaced interactions in the local community, I suppose that could be a cause for feeling that the local community was lacking. However, in many ways distributed communities can incite local involvement.

Overall Sarason’s insight into the field of community psychology was engaging, informative, and thought provoking. Especially hard-hitting for me was the conviction he expressed about community psychology needing to draw upon other fields, especially other social sciences, to gain an accurate understanding of community. This is something I believe to be equally important for media psychology. To understand what community (or media) is and how it changes, we need to understand what Sarason called background factors. Innovation will only come from a multifaceted understanding of the topics.

I’d like to read this book again, but my stack of other books I need to read just keeps growing ... so I’ll keep it on my used book watch list to add to my library for later.