[Rn_Grp6] Wikipedia issue

The essential question that can be raised in the Wikipedia phenomenon is obvious: why does it work? This question is specifically this: why do people so passionately contributing tons of organized information voluntarily, spending a significant amount of their own time? Nobody pays them - no money nor credit. What could be the motivation system for them, and could it work for other things than a giant Internet encyclopedia and thus revolutionizing the very concept of information society itself?

My theoretical assumption is that it deals with the desire to take over the hegemony of the social knowledge system. The shift is from the small group of established experts to the more non-institutionalized people in general. They have the immense need (or the feeling of necessity) of the general public to (1) produce knowledge that was not considered to be worthy of being formalized into knowledge, and (2) participate into the process of production of social standard reference knowledge. The first element reflects its results on one of the characteristics of Wiki: a giant pool of trivia, especially on popular culture, tech geekery etc. The second element is evident in the open discussion pages and editing policies.

It means that there is the need to fill in the structural gap in the communication network of knowledge. The players existed and expanded, but their roles were excluded in the knowledge production system - now they want to fill in the hole. That explains in parts why Wikipedia is so popular while other projects of the Wikimedia experiences less general support (e.g. Wikinews, with only about 10 articles being updated daily). Simply accumulation of information does not provide motivation. It is the goal of filling up what should have been there, and setting a standard body of reference for a particular knowledge that gets motivates the contributors. At least that's my hypothesis, which I should be positively proving from here on... a long way to go.

[Rn_Grp5] Open source...

The ideal of open source is promising - common sharing of the production means, to use them according to own needs. It's the communists' dreams come true, in a good sense. Sharing the source code does not use up the original resource, and people can contribute to diversifying and updating the original. And by allowing commercialization of one's own version as well (except the core GNU believers in the tradition of Stallman), the contributers don't have to starve. As it was shown, it worked pretty well on Linux, Mozilla-based web browsers and countless other programs.

However, there is a fundamental limit to the applicability of the open source idea. The first is, that it does not work on areas where the source itself is the commodity. Rhetorically, open source is more like making the ingredients and the recipe public. The competent chef still can sell his skilled menu, or even get more rich and famous for it. However, it would not apply to a book publisher. By making the recipes free for public, he/she is deprived of his selling commodity, thus destined to starve or find another job. There are countless information related jobs that rely on the source as the commodity, such as news journalism. Programmers are more like chefs - their own expertise is the commodity. However, the enterpreneurs have to make money by selling the products, and do not want too many competitors with similar concepts. Then, the problem becomes what should be regarded as commodity and what should not be utilized as them. A hard struggle, in this hyper-modern capitalist world where everything eventually turns into commodities.

[RN_Grp4] bloggers, journalists

A simple premise: most bloggers are not journalists, but the reader doesn't care. As long as it looks informative and/or shows (or even strengthens) some empathy to my views. Newsworthiness for the humble reader is that simple, as apart from what the jornalists would like to think. Things like objectivity and crediblility are some nice options to make the news more newsworthy, but other 'virtues' such as empathy and sheer speed of the information can outweigh them in some contexts. The overall news discourse space of a society overarches the whole array ranging from the gossips to the journalistic articles to deeper formal analysis. While traditional journalism specialized itself to the narrow array of the standardarized news article, bloggers are all over the spectrum.

Thus, it is not the case that 'blogs' are some things or not. Blogs are just a form of networked communication (fundamentally, it is nothing more than just an easy-to-update webpage!), that has become so technically sophisticated that it can also be used for functions that was thought before to be only possible for trained journalists in a solid commercial media organization. Rather, it is the use pattern of the blog writers/readers that is to put focus on. The role of social news and opinion production has been spread to a wider pool of its members. It is no threat to the readers, only to the journalists.

[RN_Grp3] Copyrights

Zune, Microsoft's futile attempt to dent the iPod empire, recently hit the stores.

1) Its main offer to the users: the music sharing function ('Welcome to the social"). A nice idea, regarding the sharing culture of the younger Internet generations. However, the function turned out to be frustrating. You can download a song from a peer's machine, but the song will last only three plays or three days whichever comes first. After that, the file self-destructs, leaving only a ad tag that indicates you should buy it if you liked it.

2) Then, the card it offered to the industry: give Universal records $1 for each machine sold. The record companies have long been asking Apple to share the hardware sales profit with them, in vain. Now Microsoft kisses their backs. I wonder how Microsoft will deal with all the other numerous record companies.

Both instances indicate the ridiculous outcomes, if you want to exploit old-fashioned copyright concepts and at the same time pretend to be up-to-date. In the former, even the self-recorded garage band demos cannot be effectively shared and spread through the Net - that is, you do not have the ability to control your own copyright. In the latter case, Microsoft is paying a mutated form of 'copyright fee' to the record company for making their music available on their machine, by providing them with a fee for sales of a machine that the company does not have anything to do with.

Copyright, like all the other individual rights, become laughable caricatures of their original intent if left without proper restrictions. In a country where Disney successfully modifies the laws over and over again to prevent Mickey Mouse from coming into the public domain forever, it can be safely said that such restrictions are largely lacking. If the law does not provide the restrictions, the user practices and common sense should step into play. It is the gap that must be bridged, between the already present structure of networked information use by the general users and the commercial industry system that would rather like to stick to the old days where you could sell... Vinyl records and stuff.