Sep 23 2010
Response Post: Week 3
My week 3 framing questions focused on a chapter of Here Comes Everybody, which we haven’t yet discussed in class. Still, upon reading further in the book, I think I can begin to respond to my initial questions with a little more insight. I questioned the concept of amateurization that is now prevalent in the world of online journalism. I questioned Shirky’s negative opinion, as I originally saw it, of the massive amounts of “junk” that we can find online and the importance of learning to filter through it in an educated way.
After reading the following chapter on personal motivations and collaboration, I better understand that Shirky doesn’t consider all user-generated content to be junk. In fact, he uses the example of Wikipedia which often gets a reputation for producing mass amounts of inaccurate or insignificant information on its pages. But rather than undermine the collaborative efforts of amateurs to produce the content, he recognizes the surprising success of the site. He does admit that the site revolves around the very idea of publishing before filtering. Still, he concludes that “Wikipedia articles get better, on average, over time.”
Shirky even goes as far as to credit the freedom of these amateur contributors, arguing that the very reason the site functions so well (and remains relatively valid) is because of the personal motivations that wouldn’t necessarily exist in a professional environment. Psychologically speaking, people like to see their own work published, especially when writing about a subject they care about, which encourages them to put forth their best work, free of financial ties. In this sense, pages like Wikipedia are essentially user-generated content at their core, but it doesn’t necessarily undermine their validity, due to the personal motivations of group collaboration. This isn’t to say that 100% of amateurization is legitimate. This is where our filtering skills must come in- a topic that I still hope to learn more about later in the week.