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January 2007, Vol. 6, Issue 1

THE PARTICIPATORY WEB
Then, of course, there’s the "participatory web," also referred to as "user-generated content," "we media," "social media," the "democratized web" and a variety of other names. Most of the participatory web also lacks good metadata and hence is also difficult for search engines to discover. This can be considered a good thing, however, because most of the content on the participatory web is pure junk.

Nonetheless, the participatory web had a banner year in 2006.

The Time Magazine December 25, 2006 issue cover story was devoted to the participatory web, naming "You" the Person of the Year, and calling "You" the Web 2.0 revolution, where "the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom" are harnessed online. The TV show 20/20 was on Time’s heels with a special two-hour broadcast on December 29, titled "Caught," which featured "the craziest, funniest, most dramatic and most compelling images captured this year and shared online."

The Birth of New Voices
Just what is the participatory web? According to Carleton College Cinema and Media Studies Department Professor John Schoot, who teaches an innovative six-credit course titled "Participatory Media," it’s where anybody can gather, produce and publish their knowledge about anything to the world through a wide variety of new media, such as weblogs, photo blogs, podcasts, and video blogs. It’s the ability to find, collect, archive, share and remix audio, video and images online in a new Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture.

What are the new realties of the participatory web? There are two schools of thought. One is that the participatory web is like the Tower of Babel and only adds to an already overabundance of irrelevant, hard-to-comprehend information published online. The other is that the participatory web has become the home for new individual voices and like-minded communities of interest that are catalyzing meaningful cultural and political change, with the same, or greater, level of credibility and importance as professional mass media.

Some of the literature about these two realities have strong voices. For instance, Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and Discover Magazine columnist, referred to the participatory web, ala wikis and other forms of social networking, as a new kind of social collectivism driven by a hive mind that is dangerous, stupid, boring, and, at times, capable of lowering the overall expectations we hold for individual human intellects.7

Best-selling author Steven Johnson added his take on Lanier’s point of view, when he wrote that

A swarm of connected human beings is a fantastic resource for tracking down software bugs or discovering obscure gems on the web. But if you want to come up with a good idea, or a sophisticated argument, or a work of art, you are still better off going solo.8

Yochai Benkler, Yale law professor, wrote a 515-page book about the participatory web (and much more) titled "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom." In a nutshell, Benkler asserts that we are in the midst of a new information age that has given us the freedom to actively participate in a networked information economy, i.e. the participatory web, that is not motivated by financial profit or managed by an industrial complex.

This new freedom holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information-dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.9

The participatory web is also explained and discussed to a far greater extent throughout this book.

Recap
So far I have painted this small picture of the web as being hard to measure in size, loaded with hard-to-find authoritative and trustworthy content, packed with both stupidity and wisdom, and something that continues to grow at an enormously fast rate through mass digitization and through the adoption of new media. I’ve also talked briefly about search engines and have provided a methodology, that is not rocket science, for discerning what is valid information online. All of this is only scratching the surface of the web.

Some very important elements of the Internet, the web and today’s information age that have not yet been mentioned, but are covered throughout STN, include such terms that you may or may not be familiar with: mashups, mobile computing, social networking, cyberinfrastructure, web services, virtual worlds, grid computing, social networking and bookmarking, content aggregators, podcasting, RSS feeds and Ajax and Atom, bit torrent, Library 2.0, the Long Tail, collaborative authorship, and citizen journalism. Plus, there are many other terms and topics of interest related to the information explosion spreading online that I have yet to discover or explore. Each day I am surprised by some new development or turn of events that looks to have the potential of bringing about dramatic change.

On Noise
A negative side effect of this researching, interviewing, learning and reporting experience has been that I am frequently overwhelmed, as I would imagine anyone trying to harness and better understand the web would find themselves. As I continue to surf through the web, I find myself, at times, holding up my head with my hands covering my ears, like I’m attempting to cover up some "noise." In short, the web, with all its new implications that change with the click of a mouse overnight, has become a morass of incomprehensible noise, a cacophony of websites and web services. My goal now is to somehow make it quieter, with a tonal quality that I can control and listen to in comfort, similar to turning the volume down a few notches on the stereo or radio, or, better yet, the MP3 player.

Noise, as defined through a "define: noise" prompt in Google brought me this response, among many: "Noise is incomprehensibility resulting from irrelevant information or meaningless facts or remarks." Additionally, the 2e definition of noise from Merrian-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, is "irrelevant or meaningless data or output occurring along with desired information."

Learning how to find and analyze the desired information online - the kind of information that can help solve problems and challenges, answer our deepest questions, and perhaps bring about some positive change in our culture and politics - is what every web-savvy citizen needs to pursue more ardently than ever before. The web can provide us with what we need to know, and, from an historical perspective, what we have never been privy to see before. The ocean we call the web continues to expand ferociously into something we cannot accurately predict. But two elements of the web are certain: there’s a strong cross current of garbage and misinformation, and a strong cross current of wonderful gifts of knowledge and accurate, useful information at our fingertips. At the risk of sounding corny - "Surf’s Up, Dude," - let’s ride the online knowledge wave, stay balanced, learn how to avoid nasty undertows, know where we are at all times and reach the shoreline safely so we can hop on the next wave.

Endnotes
  1. Marsha Watson, "Web Reaches New Milestone: 100 Million Sites," CNN.com, November 1, 2006, www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/01/100million websites/index.html
     
  2. Business Week Online, Best of the Web "Online Extra: Jakob Nielsen on the Unwieldy Web," Business Week, September 26, 2005, www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_39/b3952418.htm
     
  3. The Chronicle of Higher Education Technology Forum, "Strategies for Campus Leadership," Lake Las Vegas, November 13, 2006.
     
  4. Ibid.
     
  5. Miguel Helft, "In Silicon Valley, the Race Is On to Trump Google," The New York Times, January 1, 2007.
     
  6. Kevin Kelly, "Scan This Book!", The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
     
  7. Jaron Lanier, "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism," Edge, May, 30, 2006, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html
     
  8. Steven Johnson, "Digital Maoism," The New York Times Magazine, 6th Annual Year in Ideas, December 10, 2006.
     
  9. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2006), 2.

For more information about SurfingThroughNoise, please visit www.edpath.com/stn.htm

To make comments or suggestions about SurfingThroughNoise, please visit the STN blog at
http://georgelorenzo.blogspot.com

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