Building an Online World

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[Oct. 25, by Leah Gilchrist]

Web 2.0 has given us as a society the opportunity to collaborate on a new level we haven’t been able to before.

Not only can we collaborate with friends, neighbors, classmates, and colleagues, but also the world. Our reach is much farther than has been in the past, and our capability of conveying our thoughts and actions has been opened into a new world. Of course we’ve always had the option to call or mail a letter to another country, or even send an email, but with Web 2.0, we’re now able to collaborate and build connections with people we’ve never met.

We've almost developed a new dialect, or language, of the online world which allows us to communicate with each other. We use short hand, such as 'BRB' (Be Right Back) or 'TTYL' (Talk To You Later), images and Gifs to convey emotions to friends. 

This new world has opened the capability to collaborate and build relationships with strangers.

A Space to Collaborate

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To illustrate this point, I’ll give an example from my own personal experience with social media. 

This summer I created and designed my own website for blogging purposes. I wanted to try my hand at blogging, and spent hours setting up the site and detailing it. My site also has separate social media pages to advertise posts and interact with other bloggers. Just over a month into my blogging experience, I received a direct message from a blogger based in the U.K. She wanted to build a network of bloggers and was looking for bloggers to help her run a collective page to help new bloggers.

In a short amount of time, she had recruited 20 bloggers across the U.K. and U.S. to help her build this page. None of us had met in person, but now had a group message introducing us and starting to build a collective team. Here is where Tuckman’s 5 Stages of Group Development came into play. We had to come together as a group, establish roles and decide what it was we wanted to accomplish as a group. We soon chose a name, a color palette, and a font to create a logo. Over time, we established ourselves and connected with more people as we built our page.

To this day, we run a collective Twitter page, even though none of us have ever met or discussed the page in person or face-to-face.

Personally, I find this to be actually pretty amazing, but also probably something we will see more of in the future.

With applications like Google Drive and DropBox, we’re seeing more work and productivity being done without physically being in the same geographic location.

I think this is just the beginning of how work and productivity will be achieved in the future, as well as relationships we have with other people. It's already becoming more popular to use dating sites to meet potential matches and dates.

Even as we look at the “stars of the web” we can see how they collaborate with each other, and the friendships they’ve formed from shared commonality of using social media sites.

There are conventions and awards show for stars of the internet. In the video below, we have a YouTube star collaborating with another YouTube star, even though they live in separate countries. They mail each other things from the other’s country to use in a first impression type video. The other video is the other YouTube Star's response to the package she received from her friend in the U.S.

Social Media as a Platform 

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On a larger scale, we can use social media to achieve common goals. At the beginning of the semester we examined the definitions of collaborating, and this might be one of the most relevant examples today.

Social media provides everyone with a platform. As I said earlier, social media has been a space of collaboration for me. 

With recent accusations of sexual harassment from big Hollywood producers, including Harvey Weinstein, a social media movement has spread through the internet like wildfire. In the last couple weeks, the movement #metoo has spread through various platforms including Facebook and Twitter.

I recall I was scrolling through Facebook one night a couple weeks ago, and I started seeing female friends making status updates #metoo. Finally I saw one post that explained it was a social media movement for women who has been sexually harassed. After the initial pop-ups of these posts, I opened Twitter, and was flooded by them.

It should be noted I don’t follow that many people on Twitter. Maybe roughly 200. Maybe half female. I was seeing this hashtag pop up dozens of times. 

The intention of the movement was to show in real time how many people you know who have been sexually assaulted. It’s one thing to give the statistics, it’s another to see your friends, colleagues and classmates filling your dashboard with #metoo. It put things in perspective for me personally, as it was likely intended to be.

In our course on collaboration, we’ve studied how social media movements can be a place for collaboration. In this movement, it was an online movement, motivated by visibility. It might not necessarily carry the same weight as taking to the streets, but it proves as a place we can get on and share our own stories.

Some of my friends on Facebook or Twitter simply put #metoo with no further explaination. Some went on to share their own story of being sexually assaulted. Either way, it served as a platform for people to share their own story among the stories of celebrities and public figures in the news.

What does Web 2.0 mean for the future?

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It means we have more opportunities to collaborate in ways we ever imagined, and social media will continue to be integrated into our daily lives. For me personally, I’ve worked with friends, colleagues, and strangers through social media platforms. I’ve made friends out of strangers through collaborative projects.

It also means we have the opportunity to interact with one another at an active engagement. In class we've studied ways to collaborate that are not as engaging, such as in this Ted Talk on Recaptcha and Duo Lingo. 

As we already have moved into Web 2.0, we'll see more collaborative strategies taking place. In this example, it was a collaborative process, but people didn't know they were collaborating, or even what they were doing.

It has opened the gate for larger engagement and activity in the future. As seen through the collaborative projects I mentioned, these projects are happening all around us and will continue to do so.

And finally, a story of how collaboration through the internet can make our whole world, and encourage us to be just as we are.