- 6 Tangentially Important Fun Facts (introductory blog post)
- Moby Dick and the Literary Canon (transcendence: why Moby Dick is in the canon)
- Can We Value Quick Writing? (comparing how we devalue online conversation for its lack of filter to other historical quickly written texts)
- The Authenticity of Digital Currency (about what form of money feels most real to which people)
- More on Online Rating Systems (a response to Cheri's post on online rating systems for print)
- The Pros and Cons of Telecommuting (exploring the viability of freelancing sites)
- Getting to the Long Tail (about how we still start at the "hits" to find the "misses")
- Gathering Scholarship around a Passage (Moby Dick) (taking a closer look at a specific passage in Moby Dick; bringing in secondary sources)
- My Spiral of Research Paper Garbage (what set apart my one good research paper and how that applies to Dr. Burton's post on spiraling academic research and social proof)
- My LDS General Conference Plans: Thoughts on Multitasking (multitasking while listening to conference--are we too distracted?)
Something I'd like to narrow and put more focus on is how we value information put online by reading both the actual information and also reviews through others online (often in the form of comments on an article). Some of my classmates have touched on the subject, notably Aleesha in "Peer-Reviews Through Digital Media" and Cheri in "The Other Side of the Story--Comments." We've also discussed the concept of gatekeepers and the role they play in judging media. I'd like to look more into the idea of the expansion of gatekeepers.
So I guess my final, summary question would be: How does the online community function as gatekeepers, and how does this affect how we value media and online information sources?
My proposed question for the midterm is also about how the gatekeepers work in the digital world, but also if there work is biased or is it intended to be totally selfless and for the general public. I'm having a hard time connecting it to Moby Dick without making a huge stretch though. Any thoughts?
ReplyDeleteI think I've said this before in another comment, but I think gatekeepers are what deem posts valuable whether it be intellectually important or something terribly stupid and highly amusing. When you get more specific into online communities, the credits or recommendations from gatekeepers may be more genuine. I commented in Shelly's google+ question actually, saying that twubs.com has gatekeepers for the #ldsconf and other filtered tags to protect the audience looking for specific tweets. We value this site for its effort to keep tweets clean and focused. People who leave kudos on archiveofourown.org give more value to certain fanfiction stories. But then you have Youtube where more likes does not necessarily mean more valuable in terms of importance, but maybe in silliness (the amount of views on the Friday song or What Does the Fox Say or example). So there are different types of valuing media in the end I guess. Do you value information, or quality, or something silly? Hope this helps.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Amber and think that there will be value assigned to media in many different ways. I am thinking in a crowdsourcing vein right now, so this is how I think of it: gatekeeping is a way of crowdsourcing in the sense that gatekeepers are employed to assign value to media. We look at the media's ratings to see it's value, and people assign that value. It's almost as if they have been crowdsourced without knowing it. I'm not sure this helps you in your research, but I am thinking in that direction right now. Sounds like a cool concept, so good luck researching it!
ReplyDeleteThanks guys! I appreciate your comments. Shelly--I'm working on another blog post connecting this topic to Moby Dick. I know what you mean about the connections being difficult at first; hopefully it helps you out.
ReplyDelete