Trust and Motivation

Though both the articles we chose were about trust, the things I found interesting were related more to the issue of motivation. Why Review? What is the motivation of putting in effort and time online?

“users who write product reviews are engaged in a variety of activities: promoting agendas, carrying out personal attacks, boosting their own and others’ reputations, building their own identities as reviewers, experiencing for the first time the empowerment of publication and so on.” (David & Pinch, 2006)

The most interesting of the motivations the authors reported were related to Identity and empowerment. I could relate to these two and thought I would share my experience of Yahoo Answers. answers.yahoo.com is Yahoo’s social networking website where you can ask and answer questions. I joined it just to see how it works and what exactly is happening. The status/structure of most active answerers is similar to that of best review writers so I thought it would be interesting to share my experience.

Since I joined, I have posted answers for various reasons. Initially, I used to find questions that really interested me, something about which I had information or an issue I was passionate about. I wrote lengthy answers for some of the questions, often rechecking the information I had by referring to books, online info etc. It was a good feeling of camaraderie, and a feeling that somebody reads/cares about my answers. One of my answers got selected as best answer. Some also got a good rating from multiple users. I got hooked at this point because it was more of ‘recognition’ that I was a useful person and my views were accepted by people around me.

Later, I discovered the point structure. Each level has various rights. I was falling short of 100 points to reach level two which allowed me to rate answers. I desperately wanted to rate answers, especially so that I could give ‘thumbs down’ to a nasty answer to one of my questions. At this point, I started to participate in a calculative manner - Give one liner answers to random questions to get 2 points for each answer and put in effort for answers that have a chance to be chosen as best answers giving me 10 points. It was fascinating to watch how my attitude, objective and level/quality of participation changed over time.

So I pretty much went through these transitions - curiosity, need to share information/views, recognition, calculated effort to get more points to get more power to participate in all forms of communication.

Proposal for Final Project

Before writing the proposal for the final project, I went back to see what I was thinking initially. I started taking interest in Orkut and its online communities with the following two objectives.
Firstly, to observe the process of formation of an informal learning community (informal because nobody designed it to be one as a part of any formal learning exercise). Secondly, to understand if and how the social networking sites like Orkut can be one of the tools for adults to engage in informal learning, knowledge building. Adults who are outside the framework of the formal education programmes available. I am nowhere close to thinking about the ‘learning’ part. At present I am focusing more on process of formation of the community, and how they interact with each other (group dynamics).

In my earlier post about questions I want to explore, I penned down a lot of things. Reading it again, I realized that I am thinking about too many things that are going to take too much effort and time. So I am taking Sarah’s advice ‘to use tools that are already out there’ and concentrating on getting my hands dirty.

So I thought of following Baym’s model where she looks at sources of influences on CMC, how they interact with each other and shape forms of expression, norms, and relationships in an emergent community.

I think Baym’s ethnographic study as a base model will be useful to follow as the goal of her study ‘systematic understanding of what happens in a community’ is very close to what I am trying to understand.

I plan to do this mini-study based primarily on data available on Orkut on community discussion boards as well as Member pages. I am also planning a short survey, if time permits, to better understand the participants and their motivations.