One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure

My del.icio.us bookmarks contain many things. Admittedly, I am addicted to fashion magazines, as a direct sibling to my aspiration to forge my career in the magazine industry, thus I have bookmarked more than a handful of websites that serve as my glossy-paged friends in digital format. Additionally, I am interested in how the emergence of virtual cultures and participatory culture is going to affect my career, and thus how these things may impact on the journalism industry as a whole. It only takes a simple search on delicious, or even a few clicks through my network, to find a favourites page completely different to mine. One of these pages would be likely to belong to someone with no interest in fashion, and who believes the journalism industry consists of pushy interviewers with cameras and microphones. And yet, they are still in my network. To me, this seems somewhat problematic.

The resounding theme when evaluating the participation component of online communities is that they provide people with a medium of communication with people of similar interests. Thus, when pondering the example I have given, the question of how online communities evaluate quality of information arises. If people form communities with people who have opposite interests, how then do people separate trash from treasure?

As mentioned in an earlier post, Bruns (2008) suggests that 'consumers' of online content do not contribute individually to these communities, but are continually collaborating, and thus enhancing and enriching each other's content to develop it further. If this is the case for people with opposite interests, I pose the question of how people might develop information that is of almost no interest to them. That is, they will more than likely interpret the information to suit their personal focus, which may not resonate with others in the community. After reading several blogs in my journey through these interpretations of virtual cultures, I have commented on more than one blog suggesting the notion of ‘loser-led’ content; and the suggestion that everyone will have a different framework for evaluating information. This lack of a universal framework may lead to conflict and thus the issue of quality remains.

For me, the most effective way for online communities to evaluate quality is for people to stay loyal to their like minded communities. While fraught with the debate of online communities fragmenting society, it seems the only way for one man’s treasure to be another man’s treasure. Having said this, if the outcome was the opposite, the process would be cyclic and, in my opinion, no progress would necessarily be made in the organisation of information on the internet.
In summary, the process of assigning quality to information, and thus identifying oneself with an online community, is quite individual. The notion of collective intelligence is thus only applicable to certain communities perhaps?

Ponder that one…

Sarah D.