Birds of the Internet: Free…for now.

While I’m here in Vietnam for fieldwork, I’m also part of a research group at UCLA that studies modes of participation and digital culture. You can find out more of our work here.

We’ve also recently published an article that provides a working schematic about the various social forms of participation and public on the Internet. It’s available for download now, but it’ll be chucked behind the paywall come September, so download here it while it’s hot! Or at least in homage to Aaron Swartz.

Title: Birds of the Internet

Abtract: Scholarly attention to new forms of participation on the Internet has proliferated classifications and theories without providing any criteria for distinctions and diversity. Labels such as ‘peer production’, ‘prosumption’, ‘user-led innovation’ and ‘organized networks’ are intended to explain new forms of cultural and economic interaction mediated by the Internet, but lack any systematic way of distinguishing different cases. This article provides elements for the composition of a ‘birder’s handbook’ to forms of participation on the Internet that have been observed and analyzed over the last 10 years. It is intended to help scholars across the disciplines distinguish fleeting forms of participation: first, the authors highlight the fact that participation on the Internet nearly always employs both a ‘formal social enterprise’ and an ‘organized public’ that stand in some structural and temporal relationship to one another; second, the authors map the different forms of action and exchange that take place amongst these two entities, showing how forms of participation are divided up into tasks and goals, and how they relate to the resource that is created through participation; and third, we describe forms of governance, or variation in how tasks and goals are made available to, and modifiable by, different participants of either a formal enterprise or an organized public.

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