The History Of Social Networking On Media

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Social networking has enabled us to obtain new friendships and then retain and maintain it but it has also served us in a number of other very important ways. It has revolutionized and given new meanings to human interaction. The human interaction generates creative ideas, competition and collaboration. Crowdsourcing is one such example coined by Jeff Howe who defined this term as the act of a company or institution to outsource any of its functions to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call (Howe, 2006). Daren C. Brabham (2008) was the first to define "crowdsourcing" in the scientific literature as "an online, distributed problem-solving and production model."

The basic concept behind is that the general public is wiser than it has been traditionally thought of. The talent, creativity and productivity of the "crowd" can be harnessed to produce low cost solutions to complex problems. Meritocracy and volunteerism are its hallmark without consideration of age, gender, race and education of the contributors. The contributors are usually amateurs working in their spare time just as software developers collaborate to produce Open Source Software (OSS) such as the Linux kernel, and the Firefox browser. During the process, the crowd puts forth an insignificant contribution to the total outcome which is usually not very technical but involves large amounts of data collection.

Some of the disadvantages include susceptibility to faulty results because crowdworkers are paid per task, compelling them to compromise quality for the sake of financial incentives. Moreover, the verification is time consuming, and requires multiple workers to correct errors, thereby increasing the monetary and time costs of the project (Ipeirotis; Provost; Wang, 2010).

"Crowdworkers are a non-random sample of the population. Many researchers use crowdsourcing in order to quickly and cheaply conduct studies with larger sample sizes than would be otherwise achievable. However, due to low worker pay, participant pools are skewed towards poor users in developing countries (Ipeirotis; Provost; Wang, 2010).

There are other vulnerabilities as well. For example, monetary benefits are few and people with high caliber and experience are not available for highly technical projects. Crowdsourcing is usually done by poorer and less qualified people from the global South. There is attrition problem as well and low-paying research studies online are not completed most of the time.  Even completed assignments are not of very high quality. This problem was faced by Facebook when it began its localization program in 2008 and is currently being faced with some articles on Wikipedia. The lack of face to face interaction between the crowd and the client is another problem compromising the quality of work done especially in design products in which client interaction is a vital part of the design process.

However, the results of the crowdsourced projects are usually unbiased because of the anonymity of the people and involvement of a large population of participants with a diverse background. In cases where the crowdsourced project is done by the people who get direct financial benefit from the work done or is the outcome of a single person's efforts with minimum participation of the crowd, the quality remains satisfactory as.

The crowdsourcing has dramatically shifted even the organizational work patterns bringing in new ways of organization, employment, productivity and marketing. The change in patterns causes some inertia and disruption problems as a consequence of this intriguing phenomenon. However, a brilliant array of crowdsourcing success stories exists in economic, cultural, business, and political fields. Some of the examples include free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is a collaborative masterpiece of volunteer writers and researchers. The video sharing site YouTube is another successful example where users upload, share and view video clips. The Digg is crowdsourced community news site where more than one million users are currently able to submit, rate, comment on and view news articles. There are numerous other examples. However, the common thing behind all these initiatives is that their content is not created by just one individual or company but by millions of people around the world. This was the reason that behind featuring a computer with a mirror reflecting the reader as display with the title of "Person of the year: You" in the annual Person of the Year article in Time magazine’s December 2006 issue. The magazine was quick to recognize the power of the creative commons and touched upon the new trend of using the increasing power of the online community instead of just one individual or company.

Today, crowdsourcing has transferred mainly to the Internet and many platforms have been established from development sector fundraising websites to business entrepreneurships. The crowdfunding has the potential of fraud and therefore, pressure is mounting up on regulators to come up with pertinent rules and regulations for such companies and charities. However, with the present legal framework in America, the crowdfunders can raise as much as 1 million dollars without getting involved in a lot of regulations. Companies are enjoying a lot of exemptions to raise capital from the general public, contacted through social media, with a lot lower thresholds for investor criteria. Crowdfunding is the process of funding your projects by a multitude of people usually contributing small amounts. The funds can be acquired from an equity purchase, loan, donation, or pre-ordering. A well-known crowdfunding tool is Kickstarter, which is the biggest website for funding creative projects. In 2012, over 18,000 projects were successfully financed through this platform. The projects have 44% success rate. (The Economist, January 17, 2013).

Some of the other successful platforms are the following:

On the Wisdom of the Crowd platform, a large amount of information is collected and aggregated to make the final complete project. The idea is that brainstormed product is always better than what comes out of the mind of a single person. This is particularly effective in web based products where collective intelligence has given good results because here the people from diverse backgrounds can interact in real-time on a common forum (Brabham, 2008).

iStockPhoto is another example to give low cost solution to designers and the general public to buy and sell photos at low prices. Clients can purchase photos through credits and the economy of scale benefits the photographers a small profit (Brabham, 2008).

Crowdsourcing has been most successful in gaming. For example, Ticker Picker Pro proved to be a stock picking game which was launched in 2012 using crowdsourcing. This would help clients in the stock market to decide about the purchase and sale of stocks through the gaming platform provided by the game.

At the moment, one can find a platform for every type of projects. Entrepreneurs, investors, journalists, artists, environmentalists, educators, nonprofits and charities are using these sites to fundraise and turn their visions for social change into realities. Examples include spot.us which is a citizen journalism crowdfunding site where journalists and reporters can pitch their story ideas and obtain funding through this interactive platform. 33needs is a web application that connects investors to small-scale entrepreneurs around the world. Microplace allows people to invest in poverty alleviation projects and receive dividends when their investment matures. Kickstarter uses video to share artistic and entrepreneurial projects and help these people the needed money for their innovative projects. IndieGogo benefits from an attractive, user-friendly site that makes it fun to browse through the projects. Even big companies like Procter & Gamble uses the power of crowdsourcing when they face problems which they cannot solve with their workforce of more than 9000 scientists and researchers through their website called InnoCentive. The company offers good monetary motivation and offers large cash rewards to crowd "solvers" within network.

Other examples around the world include BrightWorks which allows UK causes to connect with skilled microvolunteers in all parts of the world. Sparked get free help from the skilled microvolunteers around the world. Same is with the Indian platform of Troopp. Reach is UK based platform that helps skilled people to get new experiences and challenges and in this way become the agents of change in their societies. Charities are benefiting the most from the crowdsourcing platforms to get the much needed money and human resources in a time of economic crunch. One such example is Give What You’re Good At that gets skilled professionals for charities through their interactive platform at very economical rates which are usually of 10% of the market price.

The Community Corps is US based platform to connect IT volunteers to nonprofits for volunteer assignments lasting between 2 – 25 hours. Similarly Apps4Good tackles the Canadian market and claims to an alliance of talented software developers who work for improvement of their community by building smartphone applications. Cambrian House applies a crowdsourcing model to identify and develop profitable software ideas by applying a simple voting model.

The Goldcorp Challenge is a traditional mining company that is turning innovative by using crowdsourced channel of Red Lake Property for identification of gold. Threadless is an Internet-based clothing retailer that sells t-shirts designed by and rated by its users. Public Insight Journalism taps the collective intelligence of the public to cover the

news just as Wired and NewAssignment use "pro-am" collaboration called Assignment Zero to link citizen journalists with professional editors in real time.

Tourism industry is not behind. FundMyTravel is an online crowdfunding platform specifically developed to suit the needs of individuals desiring to study or volunteer abroad. The goal is to provide a platform to internationally network of people to identify traveling opportunities and get meaningful travel experiences. The platform provides unique set of features to users where they can create customizable campaigns on their desired destination and objectives of traveling which may include study, volunteering and internship, English language teaching certification or eco-adventures. The users can also post updates and link their campaign through social media to expand their network.

Even health sector is using the social media for crowdsourced solutions such as Esri’s Health Information Map takes reports from social media sites (specifically, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter) and combines them with Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) information. Google’s Flu Trends estimates the number of flu cases by looking at how many people are searching for flu-related terms. Users can filter by locations (country, state, or city), and compare data from last six years. SickWeather uses social media reports and user submissions and gives weather maps. The platform weeds ouy irrelevant tweets and pins the important ones onto a map using a patent-pending algorithm.

Anton Root is a writer on crowdsourcing who has identified 5 of the most unique and noteworthy campaigns of 2012.

American Gut and uBiome are health related projects which used Indiegogo platform and has managed to raise a total of more than $140,000 and have been able to fund the research on microbiome, also known as all the bacteria that live in our guts. By combining a citizen science approach with a crowdfunding campaign, they hope to learn more about what's going on inside all of us.

Amanda Palmer's New Record used Kickstarter platform and managed to raise almost $1.2 million. Amanda Palmer tapped her big fan base and offered some unique perks to fund her new record, tour and art book.

Dare to Share used Rally platform and collected a sum of over $22,000.

By using a rare case of using internet fame, she has been successful to use her meme to raise money for charity. Weird perks like flash mobbing an Apple store also helped her also to achieve her targets.

Vacation for Karen Klein again used Indiegogo platform to amass over $700,000. It started with a video that was painful to watch, it ended with $700,000 raised to send abused bus monitor Karen Klein on an epic vacation. Along the way it brought heaps of attention to Indiegogo and others.

Goodbye Promise used Indiegogo platform also to raise a total of $3,240. Though it raised far less than its target yet this campaign that sought to turn Indiegogo into not only a funding, but also a film distribution platform, was ingenious nonetheless.