I think that the issue of quality is very interesting now when everybody is allowed to publish their work for free. These days, problems of accreditation and relevance are being dealt with in numerous of ways. I think that Wikipedia have accomplished to manage accreditation in a good way and I also believe that eBay is a good example of a site that manages to guide the user (shopper) in a relevant way. As I haven’t used Amazon to any large extent I do not have much to say about that site, but in the way that Benkler present Amazon’s ability to guide its users I think that eBay have succeeded in the same way. Now a day I almost get annoyed if a site I use doesn’t recommend me where to go if I have read a text about something and I want to learn more. I am so used to things, like:
1) On eBay they always guide me by telling what other people have bought except for the object I am looking at (and they also match their suggestions to my personal shopping history). When entering the site I get my personal view and tips on stuff to buy, this is truly relevant to me.
2) Wikipedia is always guiding me although I can get a bit lost when following too many links in one text, however, I will always appreciate the wiki links. And in the case of Wikipedia I totally agree with what Benkler is saying when he states that many subjective views of a subject makes the encyclopedia trustworthy. In many subjects where traditional encyclopedias will fail to distribute a multilateral view of reality Wikipedia has succeeded. I think that this is possible only through peer production and that the number of people who contribute with their views assures the credibility and quality of texts. Of course vandalism and such have been an issue, but it isn’t anymore, which I believe is proof that social media is also able to be reliable and valid.
In the blog area I however believe that credibility and relevance is lowered, but this also something that we are aware of when using and reading this media. Of course blogs published on traditional mass media publishers’ sites (ex. on nytimes.com) are considered to be of quality as traditional media here still acts as a gatekeeper. But blogs are read to a larger extend on all sorts of sites. Here quality and anonymity might still be an issue, however, people read what appear relevant to them. I think this could also be a generation issue. When watching an SVT show last week, Debatt, they were discussing the issue of how nasty people should be allowed to be when publishing texts on the internet. As it turned out in this show people under the age of 30 had a totally different view from older people who were less used to using interactive media. These older people had another view on blogs and took every published word much more serious and literally than younger people used to the social medium.
So what I get from this is that reliability and relevance are slowly becoming hygiene factors in some area of social media. Of course anonymity may affect how people express themselves, this could be an issue concerning blogs and also comments in traditional media’s online published articles. I however believe, unlike many people in the older generation , that we should be able to comment on texts that are professionally produced. Here publishers acts as traditional gatekeepers but in the social internet media I think we should be able to comment on any text (some irrational comments should be deleted), otherwise traditional media misses out on the interaction part of social media – making it non-social, not interesting to all people that are used to be able to publish and express their thoughts. I think that quality is lacking in some areas and I happy to be able to read professionally published texts online as well as less professional, and I think that I am able to interpret and judge them by which media its is published in.
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The quality of blog is a very interesting issue to discuss. According to the opinions of Benkler, the quality issue of social media includes two aspects, which are relevance and accreditation. Some people like sharing their insights of technical problems on their blogs, meanwhile, some people like sharing their feelings of what happened around them on their blogs. So different people write different things on their blogs. Some content of them are creditable, and some of them are relevant with special topics. It is very difficult to create common criteria to evaluate people’s blogs, so it is difficult to evaluate the quality of them. I think it needs the audience to use their common sense to judge, but not simple criteria depending on the relevance and accreditation. For example, some blogs just describe the events which the author experienced and the feelings of them. I like sharing my feelings with my friends on my blog, such as the interesting activities during my trip and pictures of beautiful scenery, and what I do recently. That kind of essays is not relevant or accredited, they are narrative and subjective and the audience read them only for fun. So the quality of blogs should be discriminatingly dealt with other social media.
Lusha Wang
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