Response: Week 4

This week I opted to answer someone else’ questions instead of the ones I posted a few days ago.

How are community-based websites, such as Wikipedia and Second Life, shaping our cultural understanding of the Internet? What are the social-norms and values (or even self-governing rules of conduct) of participating in these forums and how have they developed?

After discussing community-based websites like Wikipedia, I have a better understanding of how websites like this are influence the culture of the Internet as a whole.  Sites like Wikipedia are shaped everywhere, and one person builds on another person’s work to create a final product, much like the original freeware.   The evolution of Wikipedia has created a sense of digital teamwork, and now society can see the result of this teamwork in the well-known Internet encyclopedia.

On the negative side, when regular citizens work together to create a project as large as Wikipedia the final product is biased toward what the citizens want to learn more about.  In a way, this is an example of citizens taking part in agenda setting.  Wikipedia has a large amount of information on popular culture, but not nearly as much information concerning abstract subjects including science, mathematics, the arts and technology.

As for self-governing and conduct, community-based websites have proven that people can work well without an authoritative, governing figure.  Continuing with the Wikipedia example, people can tag articles as being biased, needing citation or containing inaccurate content.  So, citizens will keep the content of Wikipedia as professional as possible and watch out for inaccuracies.

Another example of self-governing and conduct on a community-based website is Shockwave.com.  On this site relevant, appropriate comments float to the top, and inappropriate and irrelevant posts float to the bottom and receive far fewer views.

Community-based Internet websites have proven that citizens can work together to create huge projects and have the ability to monitor behavior and content.

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