[p2p-research] a challenge to social media enthusiasm .. what say you, league of noble peers

[Michel Bauwens]

from nicholas carr,


http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/06/the_sour_wikipe.php

The sour Wikipedian June 27, 2009

Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social
production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character
traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research
psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70
non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts
it<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16349-psychologist-finds-wikipedians-grumpy-and-closedminded.html>,
Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new
ideas."

In their report
<http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/cpb.2007.0225>on the
results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as
social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net
than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures of "agreeableness
and openness." Noting that the findings seem in conflict with public
perceptions, the researchers suggest that "the prosocial behavior apparent
in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives ... which are not
associated with high levels of agreeableness."

The researchers also looked at gender differences among Wikipedians. They
found that the women who contribute to the online encyclopedia exhibit
unusually high levels of introversion. Women in particular, they suggest,
"seem to use the Internet as a compensative tool" that allows them to
"express themselves" in a way "they find difficult in the offline world."

The study is consistent with other research into the motivations underlying
online social production. Last year, researchers at HP Labs undertook an
extensive study <http://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.3030v1> of why people upload
videos to YouTube. They found that contributors are primarily driven by a
craving for attention. If the videos they upload aren't clicked on, they
tend to quickly exit the "community." YouTubers view their contributions not
as pieces of "a digital commons" but as "private goods" that are "paid for
by attention."

Scott Caplan, a communications professor at the University of Delaware,
tells New Scientist that studies of social networks generally indicate that
"people who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of
social anxiety and lower social skills."

None of this is particularly surprising. But the findings do lend a darker
tint to the rose-colored rhetoric that surrounds online communities. A wag
might suggest that "social production" would be more accurately termed
"antisocial production."


-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
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