User:ElR6/Major Assignment 5

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Major Assignment 5

Communication 375

December 2007

Communication and Global Consciousness
A report on the evolution of the web revolution

Knowledge and meaning are two of the most powerful concepts within communication. Knowledge is created in the relationships between meanings; the internet can be cultivated to revolutionize the extent to which these relationships are made. With the growing global network, an international public sphere is emerging, a place where people can talk to one another a create ideas.

Over this past semester I have had the unique privilege of using UMassWiki.com as part of my junior year writing course (COM375). On this website, my classmates, instructor (SJK), and I can easily create, edit, and delete pages as needed. There is a homepage that links to important class materials, like current homework, lecture summaries, and due dates for papers. Also, each user has there own userpage where we have been adding and organizing the content that we have written for class. I say this has been a unique experience because it has taught me a great deal about interpersonal communication, specifically over digital mediums.

No sooner than had we started using UMassWiki for our class then we started having problems. There were many outcries from the class (myself included), ranging from utter confusion to dissatisfaction with personal writing skill, from complaints of bad navigation and user interface to ones of the non-linearity. While most classrooms provide a highly structured and linear learning experience, SJK was taking a different approach. From the very first day of class, we were consistently hunting for buried treasure. You've probably heard the saying: "The Journey is the Destination," I think that saying presents a concept that represents COM375 very well. There are real life skills to be gained here; life is non-linear and connections are random and everywhere. I think everyone gained something extra from this class, whether they realize it or not.

Throughout this semester, combining previous knowledge and ideas with the new, I have been drawn into a deeper analysis of digital communication. Using UMassWiki as my starting point, I've been looking and thinking about how meaning and knowledge are created and generated in this digital public sphere we call the internet. First and foremost, UMassWiki.com uses a web application called MediaWiki, which was developed for Wikipedia – the extremely popular user-edited encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a premier leader in the array of modern web apps that make up what is referred to as Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is really an umbrella term for a set of principles and practices (O'Reilly, 2005) that are commonly used in current web apps. This set, as defined by O'Reilly, includes an architecture of participation, cost-effective scalability, remixable data source and data transformations, harnessing collective intelligence, and users being in control of their own data. All of the major Web 2.0 players have developed their own tools to achieve these principles. Now, many apps have a similar ritual for handling data, suggesting that there is a generally preferred method for interacting with information over the internet. The development of these communication practices are imperative as more and more people around the globe are adopting the Internet as a primary information provider (Computer Industry Almanac Inc., 2004).

Interestingly, there is a strong correlation between O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0, and James Carey's ritual model of communication. The ritual model was developed in response to the traditional transmission (sender-receiver) model. Carey explains communication as a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed. This definition sounds rings true to the architecture of participation, scalability, remixable data source and data transformations, and harnessing collective intelligence of Web 2.0. 'The Project for Excellence in Journalism' has already made the connection that online citizen journalism is a rediscovery of the essential truth Carey articulated years before the Internet was invented (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2007). Carey commonly said that communication was culture and that communities of citizens resolved disputes by talking with one another (A Republic, If You Can Keep It). On one hand you have Wikipedia, but another popular element of Web 2.0 is the citizen journalism of blogging.

There is a clear relationship between the concept of blogging and the ritual model of communication. However, the strength of that relationship should be questioned: where do blogs fail in the production, maintenance, repairing and transformation of reality? The way a users can say things to a, presumably, wide audience and receive comments and make connections to other blogs and users resembles a growing networked system. However, blogging is underdeveloped and, in practice, does not achieve its potential. First off, discussions commonly take place below a blog post, in the comments; no matter how interesting these conversation may be, they are quickly lost and forgotten. Secondly, if you write a blog about how much you hate working in a cubicle, you are not necessarily going to connect with people who have written similar things, and you are certainly not going to receive a (non-cubicle) job offer based on your qualifications and reputation. Today, it is more likely that amazon will try to sell you the Office Space DVD based on a shallow interpretation of your content. The current level of available interconnectivity is not an inherent problem with blogs themselves. The foundational technologies of Web 2.0 are actually quite limiting in this area.

Unfortunately, MediaWiki does not offer a direct solution to the pitfalls of blogging. In fact, there are many issues such as editing vandalism, inaccurate information, missing citations, and shallow user reputation. Wikipedia solves these problems by relying on their gigantic user-base, but not every installation of MediaWiki operates on that scale.

It is important to keep in mind that blogs and wikis were developed for the representation of different types of information. Nonetheless, they both have very similar functions. They both allow people to present content and have a conversation about that content. But there is no system that puts disconnected people in a conversation with one another, no matter how similar their content is. Blogs and wikis also have ways of providing context, typically by links and track-backs. However, the system by which context is provided is weak. It is weak because it relies on people to manually connect pieces together. It has been argued that hyperlinking is similar to the way in which synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users (O'Reilly, 2004). However, people are flawed, so it seems that having people manually link the Internet together is vastly inefficient. Thankfully, many people have realized this and the Internet is already on its way to becoming a global idealized brain. We see this most visibly with the development of Web 3.0, or the semantic web.

This next evolution of the Internet has many goals, and should function closer to a digital realization of Carey's ritual model of communication. One of the major standards that is being developed is an official system for denotation of information. These notes, or tags, provide a framework for which a computer can read websites and gather relevant information based on what a user requests.

In the same way that the Internet seamlessly evolved out of the Web 1.0 .com-boom and into Web 2.0, there will likely be a gradual evolution to Web 3.0. Very closely related to these generations of the Internet, are generations of globalization. Thomas Friedman (2005) divides globalization into similar categories of development. In Globalization 1.0, countries began to act internationally. In Globalization 2.0, companies began to act internationally. In Globalization 3.0, Friedman predicts that small organizations and individuals will be able to act on the international playing field. It seems evident that Friedman's Globalization 3.0 and Web 3.0 are intertwined – The evolution of the Internet will allow for the evolution of globalization. This predicts that organized individuals will gain access the same level of power currently held by transnational corporations. This level of visibility could only be attained through revolutionary developments in network technology.

As Smokey the bear says: only you can prevent forest fires. It's up to you, me, and everyone else on the planet to save the world. Do not despair, as everyone does when such a monumental task is presented to them, because the ability the change everything is coming soon to a computer near you. A global public sphere is being developed, and the continued spread of personal computers and the Internet is inevitable. Knowledge and meaning, as creations of content and context and the ritual of communication as culture, provide a powerful framework for developing new Internet technologies and applications.

Works Cited:

O'Reilly, Tim. What is Web 2.0. September 30, 2004. <http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html>

Project for Excellence in Journalism. Citizen Media. 2007. <http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2007/narrative_online_citizen_media.asp?cat=8&media=4>

Computer Industry Almanac Inc. Internet User Forecast by Country. September 2004. <http://web.lexis-nexis.com.silk.library.umass.edu:2048/statuniv/document?_m=cc1ea6d9e35c9b6e6b7a01afa47f5378&_ansset=Z-WA-A-BBA-BBA-MsSAYVA-UUW-U-U-U-U-U-U-AWUUWVUCZZ-AAEDYWABZZ-YBWDCCWAY-BBA-U&_docnum=29&wchp=dGLbVlb-zSkVV&_md5=8b052daa7b71ee2cd64209d087ba5ebb>

Friedman, Thomas. Lecture: The World is Flat. May 2005. <http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/266/>