Growing of closed community
Description:
Increased use of weblogs, wikis etc has added a new way of communicating: everyone can become a publisher and commicate his/her vision to the rest of the world and everyone can respond to the message.
This phenomenon has made everyone with broadband access a publisher. There are very good elements in this development: such as the ability to share knowledge exchange opinions openly. However, the negative side is that it is also possible to publish radical opinions and even entice people to do radical things (an example would be the sites that urge people to commit suicide or suggest extreme weight loss to adolescent girls). On balance the availability of collaborative tools such as wikis seems a positive development both from a personal angle as well as a professional angle.
Headline text
Enablers:
o The ubiguiteness of broadband has enabled use of wikis.
o The majority of younger people are now very confident in using IT in their day-to-day activities and wikis are a logical extension of this.
o The fact that it is easy to share and copy files has created a need for work being kept in one central location instead of trying to grapple with different versions. Wiki's could be this central place where all information on a document is kept.
Inhibitors:
o Lack of wysiwig editing will delay take up by less technical confident people.
o Communication in writing does not allow for indicating nuances (emoticons such as :-X (means big wet kiss ) help but this is not a conclusive solution) and the lack of nuances may put people of using written communication over oral communication.
o People's need for social interaction
o No peer review exists like there is in the publishing world so for example who knows whether what bsaph134 says on wikipedia is actually true...
Paradigms:
Wikis and weblogs make publishing easy for everyone.
Experts:
The Wiki Way
Online encyclopedia
Timing:
To return to the home page of the Future of Communication clickThe_future_of_communication_in_2015