Ravelry as a Social Network Market

Brisbane.
The next speaker here at ANZCA 2009 is Sal Humphreys, presenting on the knitting Website Ravelry as a social network market. Discussions of intellectual property, distributed participation, and user-generated content have struggled to keep up with these developments: social economy is intertwined and interconnected with commercial economy, and there are serious questions about when participation becomes exploitation.

Social network markets characterise these ideas as emergent, and provide a useful basis for their theorisation. Mass media theory also fails to align effectively with these new interactive environments. HOw is power distributed, who has agency, what is the role and impact of institutions in relation to these environments?

Is the market/non-market, commercial/non-commercial binary useful, or are we dealing with more genuinely hybrid, bottom-up social and commercial economic environments here? If so, what coordinates the exchanges in these spaces? Transactions in these spaces include the commercial and monetary, but also non-commercial gifting economies, charity approaches (making for free, but also selling for charity), informational exchanges, and social and reputational exchanges; these trans- and interactions are diverse and emergent in nature. Users certainly don't approach them purely as commercial or non-commercial operators.

Ravelry is a social networking site for knitters, crocheters, spinners, and dyers, operated by two young enthusiasts. It is a space for user-generated content, allows for commercial as well as non-commercial exchanges, and a highly social, creative, and innovative environment which has now attracted more than 400,000 members. It is a database of projects and users, a site for exchange (social, informational, commercial, and non-commercial), an incubator for design innovation, a marketing space, and a social network (with some 6000 user groups on the site by now, hosting some 5 million posts). The site also hosts both paid-for and user-curated ads.

Users can use the site to advertise their designs and knitting services (with information hosted either on-site, or linked in from their own Website, and/or give away their designs for free through the site. Sal has mapped out some two dozen of different forms of user participation and interaction which take place on the site (some mainly social, some informational or financial); individual users may be involved in multiple such interactions, of course.

What determines and coordinates users' choices in participation, then? There are a variety of sociocultural factors, reputation mechanisms on the site and in the community, as well as more technological factors built into the site. And of course individual taste and other factors also come into this.

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