mediacrit.com

One of the things that still makes the Internet an exciting mass medium, despite annoyances like pop-up ads on the Web and persistent spam emails, is its open architecture. Anyone can create content that appears online, and in the past few years a number of services have enabled people to more easily contribute.

Last time, I wrote about blogs. Some blogs are valuable news sites, or wonderful glimpses into a different culture, yet the vast majority contain personal musings that are rarely read by anyone. But, a few other do-it-yourself sites have grown into some of the largest and most popular sites on the Web.

The first is Wikipedia, an evolving online encyclopedia that is constantly being updated and revised by interested volunteers. Wikipedia is the most famous of wiki web sites, which enable anyone to edit and contribute to them (wiki means “quick” in Hawaiian). All previous page versions of the Wikipedia are stored, allowing users to see how each individual topic develops. The largest version of Wikipedia, in English, has more than one million articles. [Note to students: wikipedia is a useful source to get an overview on a topic, but never let it be your main resource.]

Although Wikipedia has become one of the most popular resources on the Web, there have been some criticisms of its open editing model. In 2005, John Siegenthaler, Sr., a former editor of the Nashville Tennessean newspaper, discovered that the biographical article about him on Wikipedia falsely claimed he might have had a role in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

Investigators later identified the man who had posted the false biography content as a joke. The false copy was easily corrected, and thanks to the open editing model Wikipedia now carries an entry covering the entire Siegenthaler biography controversy.

But, Siegenthaler and many in the mainstream media continue to criticize Wikipedia’s open architecture as an invitation to more inaccuracies and disinformation. Ironicially, a follow-up study by Nature magazine that reviewed science entries found Wikipedia’s articles were sometimes poorly written, but only slightly less accurate than the traditionally edited Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Another form of do-it-yourself content includes social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, LiveJournal, Hi5, and Xanga. The sites enable users to create personal profiles with photos and lists of favorite things, to connect in posted messages with old friends and to meet new friends. MySpace and Facebook, in particular, have been two of the fastest growing sites on the Internet. Social networking site users skew young. If you are older than 30, chances are you and your friends aren’t doing this.

MySpace, founded in 2003, boasts more than 37 million U.S. visitors to its site each month, just behind the traffic of major search engines. Its popularity has made it a big site for online advertising, and a place where musical artists such as R.E.M, Weezer, and Black Eyed Peas launch new albums and allow users to sample songs. Media conglomerate News Corporation (owner of Fox) bought MySpace for $580 million last year.

Facebook is an online directory that creates online social networks through schools. Started at Harvard in 2004 as an online substitute to the printed facebooks the school created for incoming freshman, Facebook was instantly a hit, and has since expanded to more than 10 million users at nearly every college in the U.S. and in other countries, too. Facebook feels a bit like an old-style high school yearbook, where you write an amusing little note in all of your friends’ books at the end of the year. On Facebook, though, you can post amusing little notes to your friends’ pages every day, or even several times a day.

Although both sites allow users to limit access to only their friends and block others, there is concern by schools, law enforcement officials, and parents that the photos and personal information in the profiles are an invitation to predators.

Public disclosures on social networking sites have also led to other assorted real-world consequences: an applicant was denied admission to Reed College in Oregon for criticizing the school on his LiveJournal site, two Louisiana State swimmers were kicked off the team after disparaging their coaches on Facebook, and a 16-year-old in Colorado was arrested after police saw him holding guns in MySpace photos. They later found the same guns in his house. [Note to college applicants, athletes, and minors: don’t do any of these things.]

Wikipedia and social networking sites illustrate that although the Internet has become a mass medium, it is evolving so that individuals can still have a presence – in ways good, bad, and occasionally just plain stupid.