6 April

Collaboration: a term that keeps popping up in the Media One course. The idea of collaborationism has been studied viciously by many theorists and writers, especially on social media and internet sharing. In the “What is Collaboration Anyway?” reading, it states:

User-generated content and social media create the tendency for confusion between sharing and collaboration. Sharing of content alone does not directly lead to collaboration.

This forms the basis of collaboration study. Where does collaboration begin? Who initiates the collaboration when social media is concerned? The answer, I believe, is the non-human entity linking the relationship of two human collaborators: the Internet. Although the internet does not consciously choose with its brain to assist in collaborationism (or does it?), the Internet’s ubiquitous nature in collaborationism in 2015 is not to be ignored. Probably the most important section of the reading (again my opinion), is the ‘Criteria for Collaboration’ sub-chapter. It details how on assessing the strength of collaboration, particular criteria can be questioned: intention, goals, governance, coordination mechanisms, property, knowledge transfer, identity, scale, network topology, accessibility, and equality. I realise after writing out the specified criteria you are now probably confused by the ‘list-y’ nature; I feel the same way. But there is relevance to it. Whilst collaboration can be an unintentional happening, it generally is a planned and motivated occurrence between multiple parties to achieve a similar or same result. The reading’s deconstruction of Wikipedia’s collaborative nature was vitally interesting. Although the stigma of Wikipedia is DO NOT TRUST WIKIPEDIA, I tend to take this less seriously than I am instructed to. Wikipedia is the world’s most collaborative online database and although sometimes the information may be misconstrued or embellished, it is a perfect example of successful collaboration at work.