Roundtable 3

by: Renee Hudson

•    Nancy and Larry’s Presentation

        o    Nancy

                •    Work on personal digital archives – flickr

                •    Complexity of what we’re asking users to master in order to become ordinary users

                •    Personal digital archives – privacy and persistence issues

        o    Larry

                •    Future of social computing – 2020-2030, enormous amounts of credible and free information online

                •    Issue of credible information will have been resolved

                •    Virtually every book one would want to look like would be online virtually everywhere (would potentially have to pay for access)

                •    Would at the very least be able to search all of these books   

                •    Open access movement will win the day!

                •    Most journals and academic periodicals will be available online for usage

                •    Many of these texts potentially free

                •    Access to all knowledge from anywhere

                •    Wikipedia generation by 2030 will be retiring – the wikipedia method will be old hat ☺

                •    In order to bring all this into being, need to educate people on how to do social computing

                •    Eventually, aggressive calls for digitization of all archives

                •    Very basically, the internet is a media delivery system

                •    What people choose to interact with based on individual taste

                •    TV – broadcast medium whereas the internet is not

        o    Discussion

                •    Future will be information economy of plenty as opposed to information economy of scarcity (http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i41/41b00601.htm)

                •    Past based on scarcity economics

                •    What new mechanisms for an information economy of plenty will have to be created?

                •    System similar to PageRank – algorithmically generated information based on relevance / user interest

                •    What are people attending to when they’re on the internet?

                •    Credibility less about access to information, but more about distinguishing good information from bad information

                •    What do we mean by crap? By bad information?

                •    Presupposes a set of criteria that everyone subscribes to

                •    Focus more on interpretative frameworks rather than value judgments about information / types of information

                •    Not one blogosphere, but many that don’t necessarily talk to one another

                •    Don’t need to control the information as long as you control the standard?

                •    Lack of a business model for free and open information?

                •    Perhaps a method of rewarding people for putting information online

                •    Use social computing to help decide whether or not to trust information

                •    What are the social indicators of trust?

                •    What information could we put at the margin that would help us make decisions about credibility?

                •    Everyday practices people engage in offline inflect actions and expectations online

                •    When one is an active contributor / blogger, what is your status in terms of credibility versus people who just look for information?