Reading # 3 Kollock & Smith

In COM 430Z, I was assigned to read Peter Kollock & Marc Smith’s chapter “Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities “. This article discusses various aspects of Computer mediated communication and how the conversations that occur on these systems can have an effect on social relationships. In this reading Kollock & Smith specifically take a look at the cooperation and conflicts that occur within this medium of communication. In order to gain a better understanding of this issue they compare the social problems present on the computer to the same problems that are present in societies/communities (face to face). After comparing the two of these communication forms they noticed a number of similarities and differences between them. According to Kollock and Smith the main problem with this computer mediated communication is people simply can’t cooperate effectively thus causing tensions between individual and collective rationality. Along with this they also discussed social dilemmas which are defined as “behavior that is reasonable and justifiable for the individual that leads to a poorer outcome for all”. (Kollock&Smith) An example that was given of this idea of social dilemmas was the “Tragedy of Commons” which simply was a story about herders who were given a parcel of land for their cows to feed on but found problems when an individual decided to take too much land and ruined the entire land for the collective group. It sort of reminded me of the saying that “one bad apple could spoil a bunch”. They also used the example of having a public good which everyone in a community contributes to but if an individual gets the temptation to not contribute it could cause others to the same and all will suffer. To further show how this issue of cooperation on the internet could present problems for everyone they have used the communication system USENET and compared it to a study done by Ostrom on various face to face communities. The USENET system is defined by Kollock & Smith as a collection of several thousand discussion groups that are distributed and maintained in a decentralized fashion. These groups are said to called Newsgroups and they specifically focus on various topics and issues that affect our society. In these groups people are given the ability to communicate with others who share similar interest or problems. The people simple communicate on a back and forth bases, sort of like a call and response and visa-versus. However here is where the problem lies as Kollock and Smith stated people are not always going to respond and post information if they know they don’t have to. These people are defined as free-riders because they simply sit around and enjoy the ride while all the others do the work (contribute/participate). Some of these free riders will even add useless information and overcrowd groups just because they feel like it. This too presents a problem because if a bunch of people are in the group doing nothing it slows down the bandwidth of the group. Bandwidth is similar to those herders parcels of land that they discussed earlier in that if overcrowded could ruin the whole network for everyone. Concerns have been raised that people are not using this bandwidth wisely by posting unnecessary information to groups who don’t need it. They go on to discuss how if rules where setup like in communities with positive production the computer mediated communities may succeed just the same. However this too presents a problem because again with this form of communication people can remain anonymous.
All in all form this reading I get the feeling that Kollock and Smith did an excellent job in figuring out how to solve this growing problem of free riders in computer mediated communication. I can definitely say my understanding of this topic from before reading this to now is a lot clearer. I strongly think that in order for this problem to be solves they must look at it from a community (face to face) standpoint and work from that.