Bloggers Unite

Yay, I've run into a fellow blogger, Lilia Efimova (and we've commiserated about not being able to do live blogging of this conference, in the absence of direct Internet access). Interesting to discuss approaches to coping with this - I'll just post these offline-written entries as is once I'm able to get online again, but of course the delay might also enable further reflection and refinement of this material.

We're now starting the second day of the conference, with Yaron Ariel beginning this session on discourse analysis and uses, collaborative writing, and wikis. His topic is Website interactivity and gratification expectations among users. Uses and gratifications theory goes back a fair way in media effects studies, of course, and usually returns to the forefront as new media become more prominent. In fact, perhaps each new medium goes through the same cycle of media effects theories?

User gratification analysis (UGA) assumes that individuals are active and rational players; this has been criticised for its assumption of rationality on part of users; for its humanistic approach (rather, critics say that we are all goal-oriented); for its functionalist orientation (the idea that media fulfil a specific function); and for the introspective capabilities it assumes on part of the users (being able to assess their own needs).

To address these, UGA has moved to differentiate between sought and obtained gratification and to emphasise expectancy (what expectations towards specific media forms - e.g. adherence genre conventions in older media, interactivity in new media?). The gratification expectancy, then, is that using a media form (e.g. a Website) can fill specific voids in a user's life (addressing escapist, emotional, integrative, cognitive needs).

For new media, then, there are various definitions of interactivity. Rafaeli focussed on the characteristics of communications settings, not the medium itself (new media may not be inherently interactive), and emphasised the interaction between users as well as identifying various levels of interactivity. Yaron applies this to three news portal-style Websites now, respectively featuring declarative interactivity (no direct interactive features), reactive interactivity (featuring a dedicated electronic forum), and fuill interactivity (a combination of far more in-depth interactive features). He then analysed the level of gratification of user expectations for each Website.

He found high gratification expectations in all three sites. Expectations were correlated to the level of user expertise in using the Web, however, and were also higher in women than in men (apparently - there are some dense quantitative figures here which aren't being unpacked from a relatively user-unfriendly statistics table; I wish people wouldn't do this). The upshot is that it is necessary to study subjective expectations and perceptions of gratifications in users; that the medium functionalities rather than its conventions need to be studied; that the usage of Websites by users relates to their characteristics rather than their personal factors; and that Website gratifications are in the eye of the beholder.

Will Emigh is next, presenting a paper co-authored with Susan Herring. He looks at Web-based collaborative authoring tools, namely wikis and community blogs (in which group they also include Everything2, Slashdot, Metafilter, and Fark - hmmm, so the term 'blog' is used rather widely here!). There are issues of quality vs. democracy here - of editorial control vs. openness of participation. How can this tension be negotiated? (Hmm, this is sounding very familiar...). Wikipedia stresses the idea of a NPOV (neutral point of view), and takes a very democratic point of view (everyone is an editor), and there is a way to roll back page changes, and to lock pages from editing. Everything2 has more general guidelines and involves more hierarchy (ranking users and enabling some to do more than others). 'Super-editors' once again can delete content which is deemed to be irrelevant.

Emigh and Herring's study compared content from Wikipedia and Everything2, analysing its form and format (such as length of entries, average word length, etc.). There are also some clear differences between entry styles here (narrative vs. expository). Wikipedia was seen to have more formal entries, usually presenting one sense of a term (as opposed to different senses in different contexts). The open entry of Wikipedia apparently makes entries more formal and standard, and Wikipedia is in this surprisingly similar to a more traditionally edited site like the Columbia Encyclopedia. Wikipedia therefore seems to be best suited to 'authoritative' material, whereas Everything2 is better suited to present a wide variety of perspectives on a particular topic. In a way, then, 'good' conscientious users might be a problem for Wikipedia, since they end up replicating the format of more traditional encyclopedias rather than presenting a more multiplicitous perspective.

Some further research questions, then: 1. do entries in the Wikipedia evolve towards more formal formats over time; and 2. do entries in the Wikipedia with its NPOV differ significantly from non-NPOV Wiki entries?

Next is Moonki Hong, analysing interactive content in online daily newspapers in Korea and the U.S. Nationwide online papers had higher 'active' and 'inactive' interactivity than local ones, and Korean ones outdid their U.S. counterparts; independent variables here were the service area (national vs. local) and cultural difference (Korea vs. U.S.), then. Characteristics of interactivity here include role change (sender/receiver); feedback abilities; and user control over informative contexts. Dimensions are responsiveness of users, ease of adding information, facilitation of interpersonal communication, complexity of choice available, exertion of users, and information use monitoring. 'Active' interactivity then means responsiveness, ease of adding information, facilitation of interpersonal communication; 'inactive' interactivity is complexity of choice, effort users user exert (e.g. searches etc.), and the monitoring of information use (e.g. hit counters etc.).

The study found that large-circulation newspapers provided more interactive features in their online sites, possibly in order to attract additional readers. There are also differences between high- and low-context culture (mapped on the Korea vs. US divide) here, but it's not quite clear what these terms mean… (It appears to have something to do with knowing the context of communication without a need for it to be explicitly stated all the time - Korean culture, then, is high-context, while U.S. culture is low-context.) Ugh, again plenty of dense statistical data! The upshot is that financial status of newspapers of course plays a role here; large companies have more staff to devote to developing interactive features; at the same time, Korean newspapers have more interactive features because 'high-context culture' and anonymity enables more 'talkative' uses of interactivity.

A useful comment following on from these presentations: the concept of 'interactivity' used here is actually quite different across the papers. There is a real need for better and clearer definitions of this term!