margaretha haughwout
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online social tools and local community - 2006/05/11 19:31
I'd like to point to an article I wrote, published last month by First Monday:
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/haughwout/index.html It analyzes the community using The Pool, an online collaboration app designed to facilitate the sharing of ideas, art & code. The Pool is being designed by faculty and students at The University of Maine and is being used in its beta form mainly by new media students at UMaine.
As my study shows, the majority of The Pool's users fit a certain demographic that can be largely resistant to a copyleft ethic. Students have often entered the New Media Program as a strategy to garner skills that might get them "ahead" in the job market, while faculty are interested in how new media might shift this cut-throat economic model. My article analyzes how this tension is played out in The Pool, an ultimately autonomous space that is at present populated by a local community. I analyze collaboration, student strategies of resistance, and licensing trends.
Most UMaine new media students are white, male, lower to middle class, Maine state residents. My study of their methods of resistance are in line with other studies of students who come from defunct factory towns such as Orono, Maine, where the University is located; they often resist what they consider to be the "overly-intellectual" leanings of their teachers while avoiding direct conflict. Use of The Pool over time, which is often a requirement for classes, indicates that there may indeed be some reason to hope that collaborative tools such as these can indeed crack the deeply embedded ideologies of capitalism and copyright where other teaching strategies fail to do so. An analysis of licensing trends evidence that as projects develop, students lessen controls on consumption; it is an anti-intuitive shift, but one that suggests that The Pool may alter how budding creators manage their work when competition is not the norm.
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