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
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