Collective Intelligence amd Knowledge Community

Leah Kirek
Comm 405
Final Paper


Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to communicate with your best friend who happens to be studying abroad in Barcelona, Spain? The feeling seems to be mutual with everyone in this entire world. The best part about today’s technology is that finally there is a way that you can not only communicate with her in Spain, but you can see face-to-face interactions through a computer just like an actual video/phone conversation. The society we live in now relies highly upon technological communication and we will always be converging.

When I received this assignment from Mr. Conway, I found it difficult to quickly come up with an artifact that represented societies and cultures that are converging. I decided to sit on my assignment for this paper till after Thanksgiving break. I went home to Minneapolis and celebrated thanks with my family and friends, in which a giant light bulb exploded in my brain that gave me the great idea to research online calls to other users in other locations. Sounds impossible and confusing, right? Well, my mother, cousins, aunts and my sister are all huge advocates of using this mechanism in order to communicate to each other and it is called Skype.

One of the initial names for the project was "Sky peer-to-peer", which was then abbreviated to "Skyper". However, some of the domain names associated with "Skyper" were already taken. Dropping the final "r" left the current title "Skype", for which domain names were available. Skype allows users to communicate by both voice, and more traditional textual instant messaging. Voice chat allows both calling a single user and conference calling. It is a software application that allows users to make voice calls over the Internet. Calls to other users of the service and, in some countries, to free-of-charge numbers, are free, while calls to other landlines and mobile phones can be made for a fee. Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing. (Wikipedia, “Skype”) The likely intended audience is my generation and younger however many could argue that it is a full range of generations and ages that use Skype in order to communicate. For example, my mother, aunt, and sister were the ones who introduced Skype to me and they were boasting about how amazing this was. Just to mention their wide range of ages is 54 years old, 49 years old, and 25 years old seems to create proof that the intended audience is the whole public. In order to understand how and why this great invention came about, we need to understand where it was created and who the inventors were.

“Skype was founded in 2003. It’s based in Luxembourg, with offices in Europe, the US and Asia. It’s owned by an investor group led by Silver Lake and which includes eBay Inc, Joltid Limited and Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz. Skype's text chat client allows group chats, emoticons (emotion icons), storing chat history, offline messaging and (in recent versions) editing of previous messages” (Wikipedia, “Skype”). It gives the impression of instant messaging users in which they communicate through the internet by typing to other users. This type of communication portrays a social, technological savvy and growth in our social implications. Back in the day, it was so amazing that I could go on my computer and talk with my friends via typing where we were able to share emotions, even expressions, and conversations about daily issues in our lives. Now we can show off our new apartment thousands of miles away in California from our loved ones just like they are sitting in the room with us. The amount of statistics Skype has produced is outstanding. It has grown into a vast machinery where the whole world has picked up on this invention and applied it to their lives.

Skype is “responsible for 8% of global international calling minutes, and with its users making 3.1 billion minutes of calls to landlines and mobiles in the third quarter of 2009. Skype is a leading global internet communications company. In the third quarter of 2009, Skype users made 27.7 billion minutes of Skype-to-Skype calls, and over a third of these were video calls” (Wikipedia, “Skype”). A renowned fact shows that as of “January 2009, Skype is adding about 40 million subscribers a quarter.” (Wikipedia, “Skype”). This fact is absolutely remarkable because just ten years ago people were trying to understand the internet and what it offered for the public. It is obvious that this information provided proves that without a doubt, communication is broadening to not only interpersonal communication with face-to-face interactions, but because of technologies advances we can have face-to-face interactions throughout the whole world. It now is like your loved one never left you for another country, you can see them as much as you would like via Skype.

“Skype has become the largest international voice carrier. Computer-to-computer traffic between Skype users in 2005 was 2.9% of international carrier traffic in 2005 and about 4.4% of the total international traffic of 264 billion minutes in 2006. In 2008, about 8% of cross-border calls were carried by Skype. Skype’s buzzing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worldwide. At peak times, there are up to 20 million people online (Wikipedia, “Skype”). What’s most important, however, is what Skype can do. Voice and video calling, IM and SMS are now available on a wide range of mobile devices. They connect business colleagues, saving them time and money and allowing them to stay ahead of the competition. And they help keep friends and families together, wherever they are in the world. (Wikipedia, “Skype”)

I questioned what the two authors would have to say about Skype and I felt that according to Jenkins theories, he would say that there is a participatory media and consumers are always converging. Horkheimer and Adono’s theories would say information and technology are taking over audiences’ value and independence. Implying that humans are merely a number and don’t have any significance in this society. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s eyes, if a media industry loses an audience member, they will quickly receive a new one. Jenkins’ says that this is also a chance for the individual to use imagination and show other people their own view on the subject matter. This participatory audience gives them a chance to expand out of the converging audience and let them do what they want to do. When you think about it, isn’t is kind of degrading when Horkheimer and Adorno say that we have honestly no say in what we chose because it is already chosen for us just like in a political vote for President. I feel very insulted knowing that theorist think that the public plays no role in what we see, what is provided for us, and what the producers think we want to see.
According to Wikipedia.com, participatory media is considered to be “social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people. This is a psychological and social characteristic. Social networks amplified by information and communication networks enable broader, faster, and lower cost coordination of activities. This is an economic and political characteristic.”(Wikipedia, “Participatory media”) It is now made possible for every person connected to the network to broadcast and receive text, images, audio, video, software, data, discussions, transactions, computations, tags, or links to and from every other person. “The asymmetry between broadcaster and audience that was dictated by the structure of pre-digital technologies dictated has changed radically” (Wikipedia, “Participatory media”). It is made clear that Skype is an example of participatory media and it implies that today’s society is constantly looking for new technologies to involve themselves with where they can communicate around the world which seemed impossible years ago.
Jenkins, Horkheimer, and Adorno would agree that there is a define converging in today’s society. However, they would disagree because of issues that join audience convergence. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, they see that an individual experience is not an option while being entertained by media. This is understood that as a person, you are an invisible audience and that the industry is solely one not many different outlets. Basically this means that people have little say about their personal choices. Ultimately, this world gets ran by the people through the media and I feel that Horkheimer and Adorno fail to see that. Jenkins has eliminated some characteristics of the people converging to media by saying that there may be things in other media outlets that weren’t previously shown or implied in the original media outlet. By branching out of the converging audience and letting the people do what they want is provided by the chance of a participatory media.
I also wondered what Skype would say about Jenkins, Horkheimer, and Adorno. I realized that together, Jenkins, Horkheimer and Adorno would agree that Skype expresses many different ideals of convergence. Some which include freedom, independence, participatory media, politics, consumers, and a new form on converging media. The artifact says that no, we are not stupid and yes we are converging into a participatory culture. Horkheimer and Adorno say that the audience can have any control over how they feel when interacting with media, especially in the matter of viewing or listening to media. According to them, “Industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing” (Horkheimer, 124). Horkheimer and Adorno state that the audience is shown inferred how to feel or react to media. Horkheimer and Adorno and Jenkins would agree that collective intelligence and the knowledge community. Jenkins uses the internet as a way for people to do spoiling, collective intelligence, and knowledge community. Jenkins states, “What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now do collectively” (Jenkins, 27). This clearly means that collective intelligence, and knowledge community help the audience have the answers that an individual might be looking for.

Jenkins and Horkheimer and Adorno would disagree on the idea of the individual experience. Horkheimer and Adorno would say that an individual experience is not an option while being entertained by media. People are free to expand on media franchises, as opposed to Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea that people don’t have any control over the media they interact with. People have no control to make their own choices and their opinion counts for nothing

As we talked in class, we came to a critical conclusion that Social implication of an information society is a very complexed and thorough answer. I conclude that the title of our class represents how we as the public interact with the convergence, media, and participatory knowledge. The social implications include fans, consumers, public, demographics, producers, and distributors. The convergence with participatory media is possible to demolish soft skills which include communication. However, critical thinking video games like War of War craft seem to improve social skills which can also be a form of communication.

Horkheimer and Adorno see that the audience has no control over any of the situations around them involving media. Jenkins would disagree that people do form to a collective intelligence, however they do they do have the power to use their own brain. The society we live in now relies highly upon technological communication and we will always be converging.




















Works Cited

1. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

2. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972. 120-167.