Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Judith Donath begins by recommending Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong. [As always, I'm at best paraphrasing. I didn't do a good job with either of these presentations.]

In oral cultures, you have to be part of a community to get information. Now, the last bastion of information that required connections is being moved into the public. What had been personal information — "Do I like you?" — is becoming public. And we're building out indentities on line. We need to think about the different types of designs we want for this information.

The nature of authority is changing, she says. At the Britannica, it comes from a complex set of academic credentials. At MySpace commentary, people negotiate issues of personal reputation. at eBay, the reputation system is misleading because it's really about a public display of acceptance of the other.

How do we design to retain the appropriate amount of privacy? How do we make wikis so that our notions of authroship becomes clearer? How do we make them so that we can evaluate the sources? Right now we're working in a model that says that the text itself is the primary source of authority. When do we want to enable the emergence of a final form? [What Judith is saying will be affected by the lowering of the markup hurdle and the distribution of WP with the $100 laptop: How well will a pseudonym system hold up when there are a gazillion pseudonyms?]

In a world where attention is a scarce resource, Andy Warhol was right about everyone being famous for 15 minutes, she says. What motivates reality tv and anonymous creativity, since both are about publication, attention, control?

Q: In a time when there's a superabundance of info, how do people know where to go?
A: There's a lot of social information wayfinding.

She talks a bit about the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity. Pseudonymity enables identities to be built. Pseudonymity lets people "take on the cost" of having an identity [i.e., it costs you something to be a jerk if you have a pseudonymous identity.]

Q: What does this do to the classroom and educational system?
A: We'll have to teach students how to function within collaborative space. There are lots of different roles in collaborations.

Now Cathy P.S. Ma of U of Hong Kong is talking about Wikipedia & Trust.

She quotes Fukuyama on trust, disagreeing. [She talks quickly. Sorry.] Social capital, she says, has three components: Network, norms, and sanctions.

The three norms are: Be bold, assume good faith, and adopt a neutral point of view. The sanctions are rewards (barnstar) and punishments.

Open networks are good, she says, so the ideal social landscape for Wikipedia would be members with multiple memberships, with community nodes linked together. She gives some examples of ways of bonding within Wikipedia, including Wiki Embassy and new babes [??].

She talks about the importance of transparency, with conmprehensible rules and norms and increasing the role of social interaction. And how formally should rules be codified at Wikipedia? Explicit rules are more likely to lead to bad decisions, e.g., "Delete any article with the word 'fuck' in it." But implicit rules are hard to implement. What to do? Whatever is done, consistency would be good, she says.