http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
Video Reflection
15 years ago
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Participation Inequality
I found an interesting article that says there is an inequality in the contributions that are made on the internet. Most people, 90%, don't put any imput on the internet. Instead of blogging or contributing to websites, these users just scan and read the websites that already exist. When we look at websites, we are only seeing the viewpoints of individuals that contribute. There are only a small number of individuals who impact the viewpoints of the larger group that don't contribute. Although it might seem fair because everyone has the chance to post, there are groups that can suffer from a skewed sample. The article gives example of areas that don't represent the opinion of the whole population. Customer feedback might be misleading if your company is only hearing from individuals that like to spend their time giving their opinion online. Book reviews are also based on a population who likes spending time on the internet. Politics is a third area that is also affected because people who post are more likely to be a strong liberal or conservative. The article also says that it is very hard to improve contribution, but making it easier to post is a way.
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Josh,
ReplyDeleteI agree with many points of your post, especially about the political bias of Internet users. Barack Obama had a very strong base of online supporters in last year's election and many attribute his strong youth support to the fact that he utilized the Internet so well in his campaign. Although he did run a great Internet campaign and his supporters attributed to the efforts greatly online, it was difficult to get a decent, unbiased report of some important issues online. The people who take the time to express their opinions online are usually motivated to do so because they are very passionate about a particular candidate, and also unfortunately biased.
This would defiintely be an interesting topic to research further. Since there are so many sites that have blogging and commenting options, there would be a large pool of data. The people that contribute to political blogs especially seem to be more well-educated, and thus people that either don't have time to keep up on current events or don't care enough to do so don't get their voices heard. But... there are many other types of websites that offer the option of blogging, and if you were to do further research I think it would be interesting to look more into the backgrounds of people using these sites.
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