Page 339 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2
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1 | Onl ne Publ sh ng
slippery slope of commodification,” conflating creativity and consumerism.
While user-generated Web content is largely believed to be noncommercial,
the recent acquisition of YouTube by Google for $1.65 billion suggests that not-
for-profit creative endeavors can be profitable for the corporations hosting such
works.
Finally, creative freedom continues to be limited to those who have access to
online publishing tools. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Proj-
ect, as of June 2005, an estimated 65 million adult Americans, 32 percent of the
U.S. population, do not have Internet access. These statistics are particularly re-
vealing of discrepancies structured by age, class, race, disability, and education
level. Thus, while online publishing offers possibilities for marginalized com-
munities to express themselves, lack of access often reinforces existing publish-
ing hierarchies that have traditionally limited their abilities to participate.
CoLLECTivE inTELLigEnCE
Another key debate about online publishing has focused on the emergence of
collaborative communities working together to generate knowledge and infor-
mation. Henry Jenkins has adapted Pierre Lévy’s work on collective intelligence
in describing how virtual communities “leverage the combined [individual]
expertise of their members” toward a shared knowledge-building task. Online
knowledge communities privilege aggregate knowledge production and evalu-
ation through collective deliberation designed to reach democratic consensus
on what should or should not count as valid and valued information. These
processes are evident in how Wikipedia works, where an informal, voluntary
community of thousands each put their individual knowledge to work in col-
laboratively building a public encyclopedia. In theory, anyone can add to, delete,
correct, or update a Wikipedia entry—with all changes tracked and recorded
for both historical documentation and collective deliberation. In this manner,
the community works to self-correct and filter out inaccurate information (see
“Wikipedia” sidebar).
Online publishing collaborations that seek to harness collective intelligence
in building participatory knowledge communities challenge (or threaten, de-
pending on who you ask) established models of expertise that sought to locate
knowledge solely in the heads of individual credentialed masters. Knowledge
communities not only potentially challenge hierarchies of who gets to claim
expertise, but also what forms of knowledge ought to be prioritized. Thus, the
collaborative online works generated through collective intelligence might be
central to revitalizing democratic notions of participatory citizenship by of-
fering alternate sources of information than those privileged by state, corpo-
rate, and other institutionally bound forms of knowledge built on the expert
paradigm.
Of course, any claims that online publishing will restore the vitality of the
American public sphere must take into account the continued digital divide that
limits the number of participants—and therefore the number of subjects and
approaches being articulated—within any collective knowledge formation. For