Transcript Computer-Mediated Communication Collective Action Coye Cheshire and Andrew Fiore // 14 March 2012 Assignment #2  Interim Report and Project Draft  Due in ONE WEEK (Wed.

Computer-Mediated
Communication
Collective Action
Coye Cheshire and Andrew Fiore
//
14 March 2012
Assignment #2
 Interim Report and Project Draft
 Due in ONE WEEK (Wed. 3/21)
at the start of class
 More info:
http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i216/s12/assignment2.php
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Core Concepts
Collective Action
Public Goods
Free-Rider Problem
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Collective action
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Collective action
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Public goods
Things that everyone can
benefit from
Non-excludable
Non-rival
(jointness of supply)
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Jointness of supply
 Ranges from pure (non-rival) to zero (rival)
http://www.download.com/
book_of_knowledge.pdf
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Vs.
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The Tragedy of
the “Commons”
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The Tragedy of the “Commons”
People freely consuming a
regenerating resource, e.g.,
farmers grazing their cows
in a public pasture.
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Therein is the tragedy. Each
man is locked into a system
that compels him to increase
his herd without limit — in a
world that is limited. Ruin is
the destination toward which
all men rush, each pursuing
his own best interest in a
society that believes in the
freedom of the commons.
Freedom in a commons
brings ruin to all.
— G. Hardin
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Cornucopia
of the commons?
(Bricklin 2001)
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“Public Good”
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The Free-Rider Problem
Individual interests tend to
make non-contribution
tempting, especially if
other people will do the
work.
In collective action, we can
view this as an n-person
prisoner’s dilemma
…but more on that later
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Privileged Groups as Solution
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Selective Incentives as Solution
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Free-Riding and the Logic of Collective Action
“If all individuals refrained from doing A,
every individual as a member of the
community would derive a certain
advantage. But now if all individuals less
one continue refraining from doing A, the
community loss is very slight, whereas the
one individual doing A makes a personal
gain far greater than the loss that he incurs
as a member of the community.”
(Pareto 1935, vol. 3, sect. 1496, pp. 946-7)
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“I guess I will never vote again…
unless of course no one else is
voting.”
– A former student
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Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish
and short” (Hobbes 1651)
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“The Leviathan”
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But is Self-Interest Always
Negative?
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Collective Action and the Hobbesian
“War of All Against All”
Under what conditions will
cooperation emerge in a
world of egoists without
central authority?
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Collective Action and Group Size
Smaller groups tend to have a better chance
of producing a public good (Olson 1965)
Why?
 More benefits for each person
 Generally, lower costs of organization
 Larger impact of any single contribution
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Perception of Impact
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But what about REALLY big groups?
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Self-Interest in Small versus Large
Groups
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Information as a public good
(Bimber et al.)
1) Information can be consumed by many
without losing value
(jointness of supply or non-rival)
2) When information is transferred or
exchanged, this can often be done in
replication.
“…is information like love — you don’t lose it
when you give it away?” — A former student
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What are some public information goods?
 Peer-to-peer file
swapping
 Open-source
software
 Collective editing
information
systems
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Considering the “Free-Rider Problem” in Online Systems of
Collective Action
Communality and
Discretionary
Databases
“Second-Order”
Communality
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Finding “Roles” in Online
Collective Action Behaviors
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Structural similarity
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Methodological considerations
Wei: It seems like there is a kind of “chicken vs. egg”
problem here in that the researchers first rely on
ethnographic research to identify archetypes, and then
attempt to use more quantitative methods to confirm these
roles on the forum. Is this the correct order? … Data is
objective, and such analysis may reveal anomalies or roles
otherwise skipped over by an ethnographer.
Seb: That hand-coding is their “independent variable,” but it
would be easy to do that coding in a way that baked their
results into their data without them actually showing
anything.
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Where does this apply to CMC?
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