Social Information in the Post-Gutenberg World
Posted November 19, 2008 · by Melissa T. · in social networking, web 2.0
Gutenberg and the social media revolution, an investigation of the world where it costs nothing to distribute information
Richard Stacy, Social Media Consultant, Publicis Consultants
http://tinyurl.com/5wpd4s
Interesting article, referenced above, published this month in the Journal of Financial Transformation about what is sometimes termed as “social media.” Richard Stacy discusses the transition from institutionalized mass distribution of information to the “dis-institutionalizing” or “disintermediating” social information environment. This environment is emerging as broadband access is more available, simple self-publishing tools proliferate, and people engage in shared activities like tagging, rating and commenting, allowing “… individuals to create the trust and connections necessary to transact and communicate amongst themselves without any institutionalized intervention.” (p. 93)
This article builds on the long-tail concepts of niche markets and reduced transaction and delivery costs allowing individualized preference to trump mass appeal. Stacy talks also about trust. Formerly vested in institutions that built reputations and brand name recognition over time, now trust is vested within the “visible processes;” you can make your own assessment of the process and from that, you can decide how much trust you will allocate to it. People will still trust institutions who will work to build and maintain reputation, but these institutions will need to consider the benefits of transparency in a world where it is so easy to see how people go about their business.
Ideas around user-generated content and community intrigue me. While it has not always been a linear path (!), concepts from this article including Crowdsourcing and crowd wisdom are in some ways the root of our efforts to bring the best in teaching and learning in North Carolina together on LEARN NC. The idea that practicing teachers know best what works in their classroom and sharing that helps everyone…
The rest of the article talks about the keys to success in the post-Gutenberg world. Content, Conversation and Community are the “channels” Stacy outlines, and there is much here that speaks to our current exploration of what it may take to really foster community online and develop the network so that it is more viable and supportive of teachers professionally. We’re spot on with the content piece, spreading the content threads throughout the networks using Twitter, blogs, StumbleUpon, Flickr and perhaps Facebook. Sharing control with your stakeholders (Bill, weren’t we just talking about citizen participation yesterday?) and getting the conversations going seem to be the next steps.
Read the article. Tell me, do you agree with Stacy’s conclusion “The world we are moving into is one where new technologies are making the process of institutionalized mediation obsolescent. Information can flow between one individual and all of the potential individuals for whom that information might be of relevance, without any form of institutionalized intervention except the provision of a freely available technological infrastructure.”
2 Comments on “Social Information in the Post-Gutenberg World”
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No, we will not eliminate institutionalized mediation. Example: the decline of newspapers. I expect that in a few years most newspapers as we’ve come to know them will cease to exist. I’m not happy about that, but I see, for example, the N&O shrinking to the point where I have trouble justifying the subscription price. But local newspapers are crucial for keeping tabs on local government, and “citizen-journalists” have already begun stepping into that void. Sounds like crowd-sourcing, but wait: Most of these people will tell you they don’t have the resources to do that job properly. I anticipate that as people come to rely on citizen-journalists for local news and investigative reporting, some of them will find new business models — some of them already have (remember when Wonkette was just Ana Marie Cox blogging away from her apartment or wherever?) — and there will be a shakeout in which the best succeed and the rest go back to their day jobs. Et voilá — a brand-new institutional mediation.
I think it will happen because crowdsourcing works for some things better than others. It works great for photos — free photos on Flickr may well put stock photo agencies out of business once legal issues around creative commons are resolved. But photos are WYSIWYG. Lesson plans, for example, are not. News is not. Users of those resources want something they know to be reliable. Where reliability is an issue and cannot be immediately judged by the user or purchaser, I think mediation will continue to be valuable. And while it’s nice to think that we’ll all just rate each other, who really has time to keep up with personal reliability ratings outside of a particular area of professional expertise? And if we look at aggregate ratings, how is that any different from buying one newspaper that is bigger and better because it has more subscriptions, i.e. more readers, i.e. higher aggregate ratings? Isn’t Flicker, i.e. Yahoo, effectively the institutionalized mediator for crowdsourced photos? Is reliance on Yahoo really better philosophically or politically than reliance on a press or a photo agency?
And on that note, I don’t think we really want institutionalized mediation to be obsolete. What emerges when small institutions disappear is not happy anarchy — I’m talking throughout human history here — but rather the emergence of big, impersonal institutions. Google has far more power than Random House ever did. I don’t think that’s in any way a step forward.
Richard Stacy replies:
“Melissa,
Thanks for reading the article and discussing it on your blog - I didn’t actually know it was out yet! I will now post it on my blog ##richardstacy.wordpress.com - and you are welcome to discus it further there. I wanted to make a comment re David’s comment - but I see that access to comment is restricted.
What I would have said is this - we are not going to find individual citizen journalists are going to fill the void according to how we have come to define individual journalists (which is already an instuitutionalised definition) but the process of many people making some form of contribution which can then be aggregated will fulfill the role of mediation (something I call the Curve of Common Sense - see ##tinyurl.com/2qmxme)
Neither are we going to see the end of newspapers - they will simply adapt their format to become more closely linked to their form of distribution, but losing a lot of their function in the process (see ##tinyurl.com/5eopmo)
And concerning Flickr and Yahho type mediation - the key point here is that this is process driven mediation. It is not insttutionalised in a qualitative sense. The institution merely facilitates a process. Crucially - as I point out in my article, the way you trust this form of mediation is different - not necessarily better or worse. It is process based trust, rather than institutionalised trust. And that shift from institution to process is probably the defining element within social media.
Thanks once again for such a comprehensive digestion of my rather lengthy piece!
Richard”