THE INTERNET AS COLECTIVE ACTION
Professor of the University of Puerto Rico
(Text adapted from the conference The Internet as collective action: a challenge to the Media, presented in the School of Communications, University of Puerto Rico, March 20, 2006).
The World Wide Web as a public good
From an economic point of view, the Internet, and more specifically, the World Wide Web, is a public good. That is to say, its use does not exclude the possibility that others may simultaneously use it, nor is its use competitive. It is like a park-- I can benefit from it, but I cannot restrict its use by others, nor does it make sense to restrict its use because the fact that they use it does not prevent me from enjoying it. These types of goods are very interesting and present important economic problems: Who should produce them? How can you pay their costs?
In the case of parks, it is usually the government who pays, that is to say, all of us, through taxes. In the case of the internet and its network of websites, we witness the emergence of a great public good, of immense economic and social value, that is in part constructed by businesses seeking their own economic benefit, but also in part created by individuals and communities (understanding this term in its loosest sense) that voluntarily create pages or contribute to the construction of websites or software programs. It is these latter contributions that I find most remarkable and on which I want to focus this lecture. We will speak briefly about how the internet functions, what projects of collective action spring forth from it and how these projects represent an opportunity or a challenge to traditional communications media.
How does a search engine work?
We begin by entering through the door. The door, the great watchdog of the Internet, would be Google, Yahoo and two or three other search engines.
A search engine is a program that organizes the content of the Internet and shows it to the user in the form of a list, according to their interests. In reality, it carries out three fundamental operations: it routinely and systematically explores the content of the World Wide Web, organizes everything it has found, and then shows it to the user. These three operations can be “human”, as they originally were in Yahoo!, where Jerry Yang y David Filo created a categorized list of the best websites they knew on the internet, a list that continued expanding as other users pointed out to them new websites or the creators of the websites themselves provided them with their addresses.
They can also be automatized, as Google has been doing since its origins. The websites are organized according to importance and measured by a mathematic formula. How? The algorithm (that is, the mathematic derivative that Google uses in order to assign value and organize) has varied a lot throughout its short existence. Originally, a value was attached to web pages according to the links recorded in other websites and the importance of the pages that had linked themselves to the website being evaluated. Much importance was also placed on the exact coincidence of the title and the text of the website with users´ search terms. With the lists in hand, so to say, Google has taken very much into account the amount of times that users choose a certain website from a list when searching. Every click indicates to Google that a user has considered this website more relevant than the others, and so its value “rises”. In the next similar search performed by another user, it will appear higher up. Lastly, as of a couple months ago Google has tended to overvalue the websites of public organizations and non-profits, among other changes, some of which surged as part of a strategy to further sell the creation of a parallel list in which websites pay to appear.
In any case, in broad strokes we can say that equally in Yahoo! as in Google, all of us, with our searches and selections, significantly collaborate to define which web pages are most relevant to each subject; while website creators keep adapting their pages to the functions and content that users most value.
The users define (by the visibility of their actions)
I would like to stress the role of users in this whole process and their contribution to defining the forms that the Internet acquires. It is not that which we refer to when we talk about collective action, which would be more so the supply of a public good, a website, for example, as a result of the direct collaboration of two or more people. In collective action people are conscious of their action and deliberately dedicate resources (money, time, etc.) to the provision of a good. However, although we do not define it as collective action, the involuntary actions of users (involuntary in the sense that there is no intention of dedicating time and resources to produce new content, instead that the interaction with the sites that they visit is more a form of consumption), send important signals to the creators of the websites which lead to their transformation.
Ah, here is an important detail: the Internet is very transparent. Each click leaves a footprint, which can be understood with relatively simple software programs. In the website which I direct, tendenciaspr.com, using the statistical analysis instrument that our server, Homestead, provides, we are able to learn how many visits each page has, within the period of time that we define, from a year up to each hour. We are able to learn from where they visit us; but most importantly, we are able to know, with complete precision, what they do within the website, how much time they spend on each page, when and through where they enter. We know exactly how each user arrives at our site; we are even able to find out the results of their search in the search engine.
What I am trying to say to you with this is, shortly after one suggests it, a Webmaster has all the information desired about their users. Can you imagine, for example, if a writer knew that much detail about each one of the readers of their last book? Or that a filmmaker knew all of this about their audience? Better yet, do you know how much any newspaper or other traditional media could spend on a study of its public and still receive a profile much less precise than that which I have for barely a few dollars a year?
Often times, in our culture of liberty and our defense of privacy, we look at the transparency of computers with uneasiness. Just as I can profile my visitors in tendenciaspr.com, every website can do it, in the same way that each search engine knows and classifies our searches. And the power that this information provides is enormous. Take a look, for example, at the portrait that Google is capable of doing of our contemporary culture, of the most searched-for terms in 2005:
1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter
Beyond our zeal for privacy and our fears, the visibility of our cybernetic activity is crucial in the formation and transformation of websites. In tendenciaspr.com, for example, we frequently remove sections and incorporate new elements according to the user behavior that we observe. To put it one way, it is as if each movement in the page was a vote. The value and usefulness of every webpage lies in the number of visitors, so that there must be a constant effort to adapt the structure, format and content to their interests.
Despite this, the user does not act with the intention of influencing these aspects. Up to this point, the sketch that we have been making of the Internet looks very much like that of the market. When I buy a product I am indicating to the business owner that the product is in demand, that the public wants the product. The manufacturer also eventually receives this signal: we want this product, and so more will be produced. But I buy this product thinking of myself, not about the business owner or the manufacturer. In the market, we influence through our purchases which products are produced and brought to the stores; on the Internet we influence the content that pages offer us through our visits.
What is the user like?
Now, to continue our visit to the Internet, and to arrive at the websites produced through the conscious collaboration between two or more users (that is, through their collective action) we must try to understand the user. What is the user like? What are today’s citizens like, particularly, those that are in contact with these technologies?
Perhaps it would serve, for a moment, to take a look at a few theoretical proposals from recent years. During the nineties, in the field of sociology and the social sciences in general, a lot of talk was had about the loss of reference points, about the weakness of institutions and the difficulties in finding the “meaning of life” by specific groups of the population, or even the average citizen. A height of individuality was a topic of discussion. The events of 2001 and subsequent ones have channeled the discussions towards other fields, but it appears to me that those discussions continue to have value. The State, as an institution and as a daily experience, has came out stronger due to all of the agitation at the start of the century, and today something as traditional as the debate about religion centers our ideological positioning, but I believe that this has done nothing but support the complexity of the current image of our societies.
In the analysis of individuality, the contributions of authors such as Ulrich Beck or Norbert Lechner appear to me especially valid, now more so than ever. In their vision, society gives space (in identity, in social relations, in ideology) to the decisions or choices of the individual, rather than suggesting individualism because of the loss of values, for example, as other authors say. Each individual fills or tries to fill in his or her own way these given (empty) spaces, that is, as an individual, not as a social class or group or by following the direction of a strong institution of reference. This makes for liberty, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and on many occasions it also implies a sensation of emptiness and disconnection from social groups. But, because it is something that occurs to everyone, it becomes a collective experience. That is, there is something that unites us as a collective, as a society: precisely this discord, the institutional disengagement and the overwhelming possibility of choice. To simplify, a person can hang a Santeria necklace from their rearview mirror together with an image of the Virgen del Carmen, play music of Tibetan monks to connect spiritually with God (this is more fashionable than praying), or, better still, listen to a song by Matisyahu, a young orthodox Jew who sings reggae mixed with ska and hip hop, and keep an image of the Buddha on their nightstand, although they self-identify as Catholic. Each person, nowadays, integrates the elements that they want in their “religious dimension”, that is to say, it is an individual experience, but at the same time, it looks the same as the others in that it picks elements and integrates them into a religious dimension. Although they may be distinct elements, it is the same act, it is the same experience, therefore, it is individual and it is also collective. The richness of our contemporary society lies in this, in the development of new collective spaces, based precisely in liberty, individuality and heterogeneity.
And here we come back to the Internet. If we think about new institutions, no better one occurs to me than the World Wide Web to give form to this development of society. The Internet unites us, as a collective, through individualized actions, actions that explore and take advantage of liberty, a multiplicity of heterogeneous actions, that without exception, I insist, define collective experiences.
Blogs
In our visit to the Internet, we come to Blogs. These are websites that are fed by periodical contributions from their creators, organized in such a way that the reader always enters and sees the last update, that is, reads the newest material first. Blogs can be individual, but they can also be collective. There we have it, our first visit to websites that are the product of collective action. It is interesting that there are websites made by groups of people that know each other, but I think the emergence of websites and structures that combine individual Blogs to create collective action is even more interesting. And yes, the creators of the individual pages are conscious of their simultaneous participation in something collective.
Perhaps the best-known example of this type of website is Metafilter, and I would like to highlight the existence of search engines for the content of blogs such as Technorati. We played around with the concept last semester and organized the project Diarios en red. I assigned it as homework to the students in my course, almost all of them in their first year, that they create their own Blog. They had total liberty to write whatever they wanted and the assignment dealt with an incentive that they linked themselves to other classmates that wrote about similar subjects. We created a separate page, with rss technology, in order to review the latest articles that appeared in any of the Blogs and in this way facilitate its tracking. It was very interesting, although rather than suggest a set of deliberately outlined routes between the blogs, what happened was that they articulated collective discourses, through multiple individual contributions, about what the university experience is like, what couple relationships are like and how leisure is defined nowadays. The students, upon talking about themselves, their experiences, defending their oneness and explaining their liberty, found, to their surprise, that they were part of a collective discourse, a common glance. This time consciously, they continued narrating (in the same terms) this collective experience.
What happened in a defined group of students is occurring on a much broader scale, with a greater multiplicity of topics. Almost all of the 30 million Blogs that are estimated to exist today also participate in websites that echo the latest posts. Some, like Boing Boing, are watched by more than 20,000 separate websites.
The word blog today appears linked not only to the development of the Internet, but also to the communications media. In the United States, according the survey done by Pew Internet and American Live Research Center, 72% of users utilize the Internet to consult the news and 27% visit blogs, including 10% that have created their own blog.
To me, these seem like important facts. Furthermore, this trend appears to be clearly growing, at least in the short run. And, with both the magnitude and frequency of the reading of on-line news and alternative medias, if we look at blogs as alternative media, it definitely entails the setting of the stage for a challenge to the Media. The relation between blogs and traditional media can be contrary, replica (actually, blogs´ activity has finished off the career of great television and press gurus, by questioning or proving wrong various news stories) or it can be complimentary (there are newspapers that already have a permanent section in the entrance to their page for blog content; others have a featured section dedicated to the blogs of their own journalists, or even of their director).
Blogs are one of the clearest representations of why the Internet is such a powerful tool in the framework of individuality: it grants space on all levels, an individual can find an echo and resonance in their unique creation. It permits the individual to act within the same parameters as large businesses and institutions. There are individual blogs that receive half a million and even up to a million visits every day, more than traditional media websites could ever dream of.
Curious websites based on the participation of multiple users
Something that is proliferating on the Internet is websites, normally of a lucid character, where the participation of each person on a specific topic involves a visible contribution to something that the group of users is constructing. At wheresgeorge.com, the users track the path that the one-dollar bills currently in their hands has followed. It is a curiosity, but the result is very thought provoking.
Another very thought provoking website is The Million Dollar Homepage. A young Englishman sold each pixel on his web page for $1…and there are one million pixels. The result is one interesting mosaic of advertisements, one rich kid and one more experience of how it entertains us to contemplate all at once the contributions (in this case, paid advertisements) of multiple persons.
At flickr.com we have the creation, as collective action, of an alternative “human” to Google. If Google categorizes the available images on the internet through algorithms and shows us them in its tool Google Images, at flickr.com this categorization is done by the very people who post the pictures, that is, that send them to the site and put them online. It is I, the one that has created the photo, who defines the keywords for this photo. This is what is known as “folksonomy”, that is, “folk”+ “taxonomy”, categorization of the people.
It is very interesting how these movements of collective action are causing websites and search engines to transform themselves, introducing more and more frequently elements of PHP, for example, which permit a direct and immediate interaction of the user with the content.
Collective action on the Internet: wiki and open-source
Finally, when we speak of collective action on the Internet there are two more unavoidable stops: Wikipedia y Linux.
Wikipedia is the maximum exponent of what a group of people can do with wiki technology, that is, with portals designed in such a way that any user, with only the press of a button, can edit the content of the page they are viewing, in order to add to or modify it. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia created by the contributions of millions of users, who define and give information on the terms about which they are “experts”. The result, above all in the English version of wikipedia, is impressive: probably the best encyclopedia in existence for terms related to technology, and one at the very least comparable with the leaders of the traditional markets in many other areas. There are thousands and thousands of people that enter new terms daily or clarify existing ones, all anonymously, individually, but conscious that they are participating in the collective creation of an encyclopedia.
The history of Linux is even more epic. In this case there are also thousands of collaborators, whose participation is also anonymous, but additionally with the specification that all of them are engineers, programmers, or people with ample knowledge of information technology. The open-source movement, of which Linux is the greatest emblem, proposes the creation of software programs through the voluntary collaboration of programmers who do not know each other, and whose only connection tends to be an interest in achieving a better program, although there are also others, such as that of creating a rival for Microsoft or acquiring experience as programmers. The creation of these communities of programmers (they call themselves The Community) are always free of charge and in open-source, that is, the program is public and accessible by Internet to all users. With Linux they have managed to develop a very powerful operating system, currently the greatest competitor to Microsoft Windows and with a growing market share. In addition to Linux there are all types of other programs, perhaps the most popular being Firefox, the browser that we are using in this conference to enter the websites that we are speaking about, free of charge and superior in performance to Internet Explorer.
The collective action articulated through the Internet and the unusual value that each individual contribution can have in these networks of websites represent challenges and opportunities to the traditional Media. With wiki technology we have experiments that directly involve the media, such as wikinews or our own wikeo.com, a proposal developed by students of the School of Communications here last year that tried to keep up with the information provided by the traditional media during the strike. In wikeo, each user can add news, articles or modify the existing content in order to update it. Maybe Wikeo does not represent a threat to the local press, but other experiments, like Oh my news, in Korea, have gone head to head with the greatest programs in the Media field.
Without a doubt, the challenge is there. In accordance with the type of society and the individuals that we are today, our participation as users in the transformation of website content and therefore the network of websites is not limited to an unconscious click. The accessibility and low to non-existent cost of software and space to create blogs, and technologies such as wiki or PHP, permit and encourage the deliberate and conscious participation of users in collective projects.
The structure of the World Wide Web is that of a public good (the internet) that contains multiple public goods (websites), many of which are collectively created or individual but spread by means of other collective web portals. In cultural terms, it appears that the Internet celebrates individuality as a collective experience, and feeds off of it in order to construct new worlds, in order to change our form of accessing information and our patterns of information consumption.
