The Power Law that Shirky mentions is toying with my entire understanding of measures of central tendency and using them to represent a sample. So disregard everything I understand about market research when working with numbers pertaining to online communities. That will take conscious effort on my part. Shirky's point that "We're used to being able to extract useful averages from small samples and to reason about the whole system based on those averages" (128) describes me well. Where he goes next is new to me.
When we encounter a system like Wikipedia where there is no representative user, the habits of mind that come from thinking about averages are not merely useless, they're harmful. To understand the creation of something like a Wikipedia article, you can't look for a representative contributor, because none exists. Instead, you have to change your focus, to concentrate not on the individual users but on the behavior of the collective (128).
Shirky's point has me re-thinking how I plan to go about researching students' feelings regarding Cooper Library. A community is like the Wikipedia contributors - there is no representative user. I was initially thinking of creating a survey for student. If we need to worry about the behavior of the collective, how do you research that exactly? Do I research similar collectives and learn how to apply it to Cooper? Or does my initial reaction to create a survey still work as long as I map out how all the responses would play off one another. What if I just don't use the means of my results but factor in the medians and modes as well. That has me analyzing all components of my data and accounting for how drastically outliers can skew a mean. In fact, the mean doesn't seem too incredibly relevant when working with the Power Law. It's more the mode and median. Or, do I go for a qualitative study to account for behavior practices.
The various roles in online communities have me looking back to Howard's influence chapter and the various needs of different types of users. Keeping in mind Li & Bernoff, Kim, and Wegner's approaches to understanding community members will be key in this. They make up the collective that Shirky discusses, and their behavior plays off each other to bring about the collective behavior.
After speaking with Ms. Reid last week, it sounds like she almost wants her efforts with Twitter and social media to reach a Broadcast-like relationship. She wants audience numbers to go up; when that happens interaction will become more difficult, and with that forming a community. She says that she tries to respond to every tweet that mentions the library. Will this still be plausible with an increase in followers? This is where I feel Shirky clarifies the difference between audience and community well. "An audience isn't just a big community; it can be anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn't just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack" (85). This distinction is key when considering our work for Cooper Library. To achieve a sense of community, there must be that social density. Applying the components of Howard's RIBS can help get there.
Another point of Shirky's that had me referring back to one of Howard's techniques was his vignette about how you'd find a specific book if they were all dumped out on a football field. The prior knowledge is eliminated once the books are strewn across the field. Shirky's use of Esther Dyson's statement sums this up well, "When we call something intuitive, we often mean familiar." And I thought of the Visitor Center that Howard recommends for new users. Let's face it, Cooper Library is new to most students. When I was a freshman at Miami one of my professors gave each person in her class the assignment of telling her what color the carpet was in the library to make us get over our fear of a new setup and get in there to start figuring it out. Could this also be capitalized on to have students create library horror stories in almost a comical light of times they struggled to navigate the library and what they eventually learned from it? Would this serve as a way of teaching students new to the library, especially freshman, of its services and how to go about doing something that seems confusing?
Finally, because I wouldn't want to ignore Howard's final chapter, his point about decision-making contexts struck me. I agree entirely with him that "the scarce resource and principal commodity in the future will be attention. The ability to connect everybody with everybody isn't going to sell the network for much longer" (221). Students are busy and prioritize on what captures their attention. It's why procrastination is so commonplace. The assignment fails to capture their attention until it's almost due. Whatever is implemented for Cooper will have to account for students' attention. Therein lies their remuneration. Being part of the community of Cooper Library cannot require a tremendous amounts of user attention. (Then again, there may be those outliers who want to give it plenty of attention. How do we differentiate to account for those few?) The decision-making context will be key for library patrons. Like Howard has been saying all along, we'll need RIBS to get there.
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