BIRDS OF THE INTERNET

Abstract

Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder's handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.

Keywords:

• participation
• Internet
• governance
• comparative analysis
• organization
• social media
• open source

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the US National Science Foundation's Virtual Organizations as Socio-technical Systems directive, grant #1025569. Thanks are also due the fellows of the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA for their careful reading of and response to the paper.

Notes

1. Apache Foundation manages organizational aspects associated with the open source, volunteer-created Apache Web Server, which has for the past decade run on more the 50% of the servers on the world wide web; Wikipedia is a well-known community-edited encyclopedia; Linden Labs is the new media/gaming firm which created the persistent world Second Life; Current TV was an attempt by former US Vice President Al Gore to create a new media-based alternative to mainstream mass media, by allowing amateur journalists to produce and distribute video news stories on cable and satellite television; and PatientsLikeMe is an online community for sufferers of specific diseases like Mood Disorders, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Epilepsy, in which they can share intimate details about symptoms, treatments and experiences with other sufferers.

2. Recent work on the cultural and political economy of the Internet has given a range of labels to this general phenomenon: web 2.0, social media, ‘peer production’ (Benkler 2006), ‘produsage’ (Bruns 2008), ‘the wisdom of crowds’ (Surowiecki 2004), ‘prosumers/prosumption’ (Toffler 1980; Jurgenson & Ritzer 2010), the ‘network society’ (Castells 1996, 2001), ‘protocol’ (Galloway 2004), ‘user-led innovation’ (von Hippel 2005), ‘recursive publics’ (Kelty 2008), ‘creation capitalism’ (Boellstorff 2008), ‘convergence culture’ (Jenkins 2006b), ‘organized networks’ (Rossiter 2006; Lovink & Rossiter 2005), ‘wikinomics’ (Tapscott & Williams 2006) ‘networked publics’ (Varnelis & Annenberg Center for Communication 2008; boyd, 2008), ‘cognitive surplus’ (Shirky 2010), and ‘cybernetic totalism’ (Lanier 2010).

3. The problem is also one of political commitments: some scholars see only flying birds – the liberatory and democratizing potential of the Internet (Shirky 2008, Shirky 2010; Tapscott & Williams 2006) – while others see only caged birds – the insidious extension of capitalist exploitation, the ‘consumerization of politics’ (Terranova 2000; Dean, Lovink & Anderson 2006; Barbrook 2007; Keen 2008; Carr 2010; Lanier 2010).

4. Our comparative empirical approach builds on the now significant body of literature that uses in-depth, qualitative, long-term anthropological and sociological methods to analyze Internet-mediated endeavors; the five cases we dwell on here are drawn from over 50 in our hybrid dataset/literature review. The bulk of existing work covers Free and Open Source software and challenges many core concepts in the social sciences such as collective action problems, organizational learning, and public sphere theory (Ratto 2003; Coleman 2004; Weber 2004; Kelty 2008; Karanovic 2008). Related work in user-led innovation has focused on the effects of participation on innovation outcomes in high tech industries (von Hippel 2005; Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke & West 2006). Wikipedia has also generated a growing body of empirical analysis, often with and through the detailed help of wikipedia participants themselves (Viégas, Wattenberg & McKeon 2007; Butler, Joyce & Pike 2008; Forte, Larco & Bruckman 2009; Geiger & Ribes 2010; Reagle 2010), as has Facebook (Gershon 2010). New media, journalism, and online interactive game-spaces (i.e., massively multiplayer role playing games and persistent worlds) have also received significant detailed attentions, most significantly Linden Labs and Second Life, and World of Warcraft (Castronova 2005; Boellstorff 2008; Malaby 2009; Golub 2010). Similarly, work on participation in science and engineering, has exploded in the last decade as well (Lengwiler 2008; Irwin & Wynne 1995; Joss & Durant 1995; Irwin 2001;Guston 1999; Wynne 2002; Jasanoff 2003; Frickel & Moore 2006; Epstein 2007; Callon & Rabeharisoa 2008).

5. On problematization and the nature of concept work undertaken here, Rabinow 2003, 2008.

6. The sense that the Internet has had an effect on every aspect of organized human life – economic, aesthetic, cultural, religious, physical, geographical, emotional/personal give it the character of what anthropologist Marcel Mauss called a ‘ total social fact’ (Mauss 1990; Gofman 1998). Like ‘gift exchange’ in Mauss's oeuvre, the Internet is irreducible, but is neither a concrete thing (an exchange token) nor an abstract relationship (debt), but something in between, responsible for the genesis of the social ties. The notion of platform shares something with the emergent field in software studies of ‘platform studies’ (Montfort & Bogost 2009). But whilst platform studies clearly aim to focus scholars’ attention on the computer architectures and their cultures, it remains agnostic about whether one platform matters more than another, or in what relationship they stand to each other. The Internet is not at ‘the bottom’ of anything, but rather in the sense that Mauss gave to total or general social facts, is a ‘phenomen[on] which extend[s] to the whole of social life’ (Mauss 2005, p. 70). Our use of platform here is probably more akin to that used by Cambrosio and Keating (2003), which suggests that innovation or knowledge production emerges from a flexible configuration of concepts and methods, physical experimental apparatuses, social relations and institutional arrangements.

7. The terms ‘network’ and ‘community’ are similarly overdetermined, see Postill (2008).

8. Note that the critiques of public sphere theory that emphasize its exclusivity (e.g. Fraser 1990) do not thereby assert that public spheres are, in fact, just another species of organization, but that they are unjust and exclusionary in a structural sense, and hence a corrupt form of an ideal public sphere, or even an impossible ideal.

9. Research on the cultural aspects of online communities and that on the digital divide are situated at this border between OPs and the general public: although anyone can, it is not empirically the case that ‘anyone’ does in fact join a given OP. Gender, skill-level, technological literacy, possibility for remuneration or the development of cultural capital, perceptions of social hierarchy and opportunity, and many other factors govern who crosses this boundary and who does not. Furthermore, every OP develops a different configuration of participants that may mirror specific demographic characteristics (e.g. boyd 2008).

10. The language of resources should evoke the approach of analyzing these projects as commons in the tradition of Elinor Ostrom. In that tradition resource-management implies the formation of governance systems, formal and informal norms of property. Only recently has the approach been applied to intangible property (compare Hess & Ostrom 2007; Schweik, English, Paienjton & Haire 2010; Schweik & Kitsing 2010).

11. Zittrain's distinction, to be useful, should be refined as two separate variables (tethered vs. untethered and generative vs. non-generative). Second Life represents a case where this grid of possibilities could be more clearly articulated. Second Life as a body of code over which Linden Labs maintains control is tethered and non-generative of further versions of the world. Within the world of Second Life, that code is tethered, but generative of unpredictable relations and situations.

12. Apache Software Foundation and Wikimedia clearly state goals on their respective websites: http://www.apache.org/foundation/faq.html; http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement

13. On conferences, see Coleman (2010). In addition, software coding recapitulates governance even at the level of code, in that there are discussions within the code itself, written as comments, debating the various merits of how to do one thing or another. Such discussions are clearly hidden, to some extent, but they are not inaccessible.

14. Interestingly, all of these terms of submission and use are contained in a single, and very long, legal document: http://current.com/s/terms.htm that includes terms for content submission (POD and VCAM) as well as general use and participation on the site.

15. Available at http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php (accessed 22 June 2010).

16. More recently, Wales has applied the wiki model to revenue-generating endeavors. In 2004, Wales created Wikia with Angela Beesley. In contrast to Wikipedia, Wikia constitutes a revenue generating wiki, based on advertising through Google AdWords. Wikia also has close financial relationships with powerful members of the Silicon Valley elite like the Omidyar Network, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, legendary Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway, and eBay vice president Gil Penchina, and Amazon (Greenstein, Frazzano & Meagher, 2009). Wikia's footprint on the wider Internet landscape is still unclear, however Wales’ influence across the Wikipedia, Wikimedia, and Wikia should encourage further research into the role of these charismatic leaders in shaping the dynamics within these ecologies.