Designing Systems that Support the Blogosphere for Deliberative Discourse

Abstract

Zaheeruddin AsifInstitute of Business Administration Karachi zuasif@gmail.com Web 2.0 has great potential to serve as a public sphere (Habermas, 1974;Habermas, 1989) -a distributed arena of voices where all who want to do so can participate. A well-functioning public sphere is important for pluralistic decision-making at many levels, ranging from small organizations to society at large. In this paper, we analyze the capability of the blogosphere in its current form to support such a role. This analysis leads to the identification of the principal issues that prevent the blogosphere from realizing its full potential as a public sphere. Most significantly, we propose that the sheer volume of content overwhelms blog readers, forcing them to restrict themselves to only a small subset of valuable content. This ultimately reduces their level of informedness. Based on past research on managing discourse, we propose four design artifacts that would alleviate these issues: a communal repository, textual clustering, visual cues, and a participation facility for blog users. We present a prototype system, called FeedWiz, which implements several of these design artifacts. Based on this initial design, we formulate a research agenda for the creation of new tools that effectively harness the potential of the growing body of user-generated content in the blogosphere and beyond. WEB 2.0 AND THE PERILS OF SELF-PUBLISHINGWeb-based collaborative applications commonly known as "Web 2.0" (O'Reilly, 2005) have been changing the way individuals interact with each other and the public at large. These applications have changed the communication paradigm from a one-to-many to a many-to-many format. Web 2.0 , at its core, is a mechanism for self-publishing user-generated content (Cayzer, 2004), which can be in various forms ranging from online video (e.g., YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe) to text-based content (e.g., Blogger.com, WordPress, Wikipedia). The intended audience of information shared in Web 2.0 also varies greatly, from narrowly focused content to information intended for a much broader audience. For example, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace provide mechanisms for users to share information about themselves with unique and limited networks of individuals. In addition to this kind of "narrowcasting," using Web 2.0 to broadcast to a broader audience is also common. Users of Twitter can publish brief, public "microblog" entries regarding what they are doing at any point in time. Another example is user-created posts sharing reactions to news stories on CNN.com.Within its many applications, one of the most visible and established components of Web 2.0 is the weblog (or "blog"). The term "blog" is commonly used to describe a web site where an individual (typically the owner or the "main author" of the site) or a group of individuals write about a variety of topics such as the details of their daily lives or their reactions to ongoing world events. New technologies have made it very easy for users of all skill l...

The active audience of the weblog format

“…Many researchers have conceived, and, to some extent, implemented new tools for navigating blogs and the blogosphere (Baumer & Fisher, 2008;Campbell, Fouché, & Weiss, 2005;Indratmo, & Gutwin, 2008;Java, Kolari, Finin, Joshi, & Oates, 2007;Schuff, Turetken, & Asif, 2010;Tauro, Ahuja, Pérez-Quiñones, Kavanaugh, & Isenhour, 2008). Supplementing the typology of Audience Activity, data concerning how readers find and keep track of blogs will be of value to these and other researchers.…”

“…Many researchers are interested harnessing the potential of blogs to act as a "well-functioning public sphere… for pluralistic decision-making at many levels ranging from small organizations to society at large" (Schuff et al, 2010). Pluralistic decision-making requires that "as many users as possible [can] add to the conversation in a meaningful way" (Schuff et al).…”

“…Several researchers have made recommendations concerning functionality to facilitate interaction, and have discussed in what contexts and for what purposes some functionalities are important (see, for example, (Schuff et al, 2010) concerning deliberative discourse).…”

E-Democracy at the Transnational Level: Innovation and Disillusionment in Accountability's Second Wiki-Based Consultation Process

“…Second, wikis enable the participants to monitor the deliberation process as it unfolds, keeping track of the issues and arguments that are raised, and sorting the different issues into distinct threads. 3 In keeping track of the argumentation process the wiki system plays a record-keeping role, providing a complete description of the deliberation process; in that way wiki technology can assist participants to overcome the problem of information overload as they struggle to deal with the information generated through the deliberation process (Schuff, Turetken, and Zaheeruddin 2010;Ennals, Trushkowsky, and Agosta 2010). Some argumentation systems can also fulfill a more problematic function of evaluating the justification status of the statements made, either by reflecting the conclusions reached by the participants or by using certain rules of inference that are built into the system (Yearwood andStranieri 2009, 2010).…”

Introduction to the Special Issue on Human-Computer Interaction in the Web 2.0 Era

“…A few exceptions can be found in the archives of this journal where Schuff et al (2010) proposed design guidelines to improve user interactions with weblogs, and Kobler et al (2011) introduced a system that allows online social network users to complement their offline social interactions with their social networking site (Facebook) profile information. Given this context of a broad domain with relatively little published research, we were fortunate to receive interesting and novel contributions that address some aspects of the above-mentioned challenges.…”