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ABSTRACT
This paper addresses the idea of having ‘information experiences’ in our information society, a concept that prevails in the business world but is under-explored in the sociological study of information. From the literature, I identify the three theoretical approaches to these experiences as simulated, personalized and epistemological, and adopt an interpretivist approach to explore how recent trends manifest. Simulated experience is closely related to ‘virtuality’, a concept developed in the early days of the internet, while personalized experience arises out of participation in social websites. Centring on the third, I use data from Yam’s case studies on Wikipedia and further propose three factors that sustain the discursive environment of epistemological experience.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributors
Shing-Chung Jonathan Yam is a PhD graduate from the Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interest comprises information sociology, sociology of the internet and social theory. His recent publications include ‘Negotiating boundaries of knowledge: discourse analysis of Wikipedia’s Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussion.’ (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2016) and ‘Sociotechnical interaction at work: an ethnographic study of the Wikipedia community’ (Text & Talk, 2015).
Notes
1 Lior (Citation2013).
2 Oxford Dictionaries (n.d.).
3 NPOV is Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View policy.
4 Editors’ own contribution pages contain their entire editing history. General behaviour as signalled by these edits can form the basis of acceptance or rejection of request for adminship.
5 I refrain from using the word ‘vote’ here because the outcome is not a simple count of majority.
6 This is one of the anachronistic problems in Wikipedia research, because the earlier Wikipedia has a much less prominent power hierarchy and relies less on rules and their interpretation.
7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not accessed 15 February 2015.
8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights accessed 15 February 2015.
9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_do_not_bite_the_newcomers accessed 20 March 2015.
10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page accessed 20 December 2014.
11 Despite this reflection, assumptions based on virtuality and the community aspect of online sociality still prevailed in the revised edition.
12 This has in fact been observed before the internet revolution. For example, Meyrowitz (Citation1986) described the dissolution between front and backstage (Goffman Citation1959) in his television community.
13 Boyd (Citation2006).