Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
As an avid public-radio fan, (I embrace what others consider my “nerdness”) I’ve recently been exploring the world of podcasts since I don’t own a radio in my house and stopped driving my car (current modes of transportation: feet, trolley, bus, and…
Much of the reading for Preece this week involved evaluating communities. Surveys are a fine example of a means of evaluating. Digital questionnaires are becoming more frequent within online communities partly because of the ease associated with their completion and return. Digital…
Usability is often evaluated in terms of ease of use – an important area of study highlighted by people like Krug (2006) and Jakob Nielson; however Preece (2000) provides a solid argument for the need to evaluate websites systematically from three vantage…
The readings for this week mentioned the use of IP addresses as a usual component of online communities for such things as being a means to spot or discourage grifters (and to help with moderation. A trail is left by someone when…
I’m not sure if this website has been mentioned before, but I thought I would bring it to the class’ attention. Purdue Online has been in existence for a few years now. It currently consists of 4, 575 members. It already supports…
Powazek (2002) stated three key issues in his book Design for Community that should be initially considered when building a community; audience, content, and community. Likewise, Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder (2002) in their book entitled Cultivating Communities of Practice spoke of a…
The readings for this week are concerned with online community membership. Some focuses are why people join communities and how can contribution levels increase. I came across a 1993 blog passage from the Blog of Collective Intellegence that focuses on an interesting…
In reading the pieces on Wikipedia I was struck by a paradox that I call Darwinian Equality. It seems that one of the fundamental assumptions of Wikipedia is that the best will rise to the top – in a survival of the…
Web logs, or rather blogs, are all over the internet as a means of doing something that was once thought lost; ordinary people publicly discussing various topics. A site called Change This was created in 2004 that supports open communication among regular…
Blogs are about having a voice – whether it be a political or civic voice (Wolf, 2004; Korblum, 2003) or a personal voice. We want to be heard in the political arena, in the news arena, and in the personal area. Why…
In class, Soren began to comment on 3 to 4 themes from the 60s counterculture that influenced (some might say underpinned) contemporary online interaction. We only got two of them out: Self Expression and Self Discovery Refusal to Be Part of the…
Codifying Accidental Knowledge (or Cultural/Local Information) One of my major problems as a graduate student was figuring out what I needed to do – where to go – and when I should do it. I got a lot of information from our…
The Purdue website has a very poor search engine. Our class project could have a better search engine on it that could serve the students in a more efficient manor. An embedded Google search engine could be a possible idea. The link…
One of the questions associated with the assigned readings was in reference to Weinberger and similarities associated with Rheingold or Seabrook. In the chapter entitled Togetherness by Weinberger differences are stated between the real world and web groups. I see thinking along…
Authority and expertise has changed. Weinberger’s chapter on “The Hyperlinked Organization†in The Cluetrain Manifesto (2004) and his chapter on “Knowledge†in Small Pieces Loosely Connected (2002) both talk about how authority no longer means what it used to mean. There are…
It seems, we need (or at least greatly benefit) from the tension between community and individual as manifested on the Web, at least according to Weinberger’s chapter on “Togetherness” in Small Pieces Loosely Joined (2002). If one extrapolates from his argument, one…
Communitas is an online journal that is a part of the wikimedia foundation. This journal involves community development for wiki with the common goal of good will. Can the term communitas really be applied to this website/fundraising project?
Is the Internet, as we’ve seen it described in our readings, and perhaps also as we’ve experienced it, a liminal state itself? Namely is the Internet a component or vehicle by which the process of liminality is being accomplished. As Turner (1995)…
So the crux – or at the very least a major discussion area in our offline discussions – has been the idea of the tension between the individual and the community. Specifically two major questions we’ve asked: whether the individualistic-communitarion dichotomy is…
A thought on our discourse on television. Many people felt that TV was not an interactive medium – rather it was a passive medium that broadcasts messages. It made me think about the history of education. Traditionally, modern education has been broadcast…
If I understood Gabe correctly, he disagreed with the idea that community necessarily had to involve some level of compulsion or force that the group has over the individual; however, perhaps that is part of the cost of being in a community.…
In his postlogue/added chapter to his book, Rheingold asks whether the use of the “phrase virtual community is a perversion of the notion of community?” (2001, p.325). He then goes on to talk about Clifford Stoll as an example of someone who…
When it comes to the “dilemma of modernityâ€, namely, the tension between individual expression and community spirit (Matei, 2001) all the authors have an opinion on how serious it is and whether it can be resolved. Rheingold in a lengthy postlogue remains…
Thinking about the concept of group-mind in class today, made me think about Wikipedia – which is founded in part on the idea that one can gather knowledge from the many rather than being limited to a few individuals as sources of…
Perhaps it is my return to a small town format – or perhaps my background in non-profits and volunteers – or a history of having suffered or thrived (sometimes both) at the hands of various communities, or simply wanting to be a…