14 Living

Star2, ThurSday 10 January 2013

ReWired

NIKI CHEONG

star2@thestar.com.my

UST a few days before the new year, app

tracker AppData set traditional media and
social networks abuzz with news that
users of photo-sharing application Instagram
were ditching it because of the controversy
regarding its terms and service.
That week, I wrote about how Instagram
had upset many of its users following its new
policy announcement which indicated that
the company could use and share information
and photos belonging to users (that policy has
since been chucked out).
AppData was quoted by several media
outlets, including the New York Post, as saying that it was pretty sure the decline in
Instagram users was due to the terms of service announcement.
Instagram denied this, and technology
writer Mark Rogowsky wrote for Forbes, arguing against AppDatas analysis by suggesting that the lower usage numbers could be
attributed more to user behaviour during the
holiday period than an exodus of users from
the service.
For a few days after the policy announcement, though, many Instagram users had
threatened to leave. Many had even started
trying out different options and it has been
suggested that Yahoo!s Flickr had benefitted
from this.
Still, most users stayed on. One reason
could be because of the numbers game. Over
the past few years, users of social networks
have become so reliant on numbers not just
in terms of friends or followers, but also how
many comments or Likes ones posts receive
that is it hard to just pack up and move on.
Another factor might be the closed platform set-up of many social networks where

Benefit is a
two-way street
Companies and users have a responsibility to ensure that
we keep on contributing to the amazing pool of
information that is the Internet.

the provider or operator has control over

applications and content. There is no simple
way to download your history and take it
along with you.
With Instagram, for example, you may be
able to download your photos using a service
like Instaport (http://web2.instaport.me), but
you lose any data that may be attached to it
such as comments and Likes; and the quality
of the pictures may be compromised as well.
Then, and related to the second reason,
there is also the realisation that at the end
of the day, all these sites are the same. They
may go by different names and have different
features but essentially, they all encourage
users to be social beings, to share content or
data with one another and put out a lot of
information on the Internet.
This habit of being social, sharing and
putting our resources together is not new.
People have been engaging in such activities
well before the emergence of the trend to
digitise everything. It is the pervasiveness of
social networks that has caused such interaction to be discussed a lot of late.
Even from a digital perspective, it is not

really new. Back in 2006, Harvard Law School

professor Yochai Benkler, in his seminal book
The Wealth Of Networks, talks about what he
terms as commons-based peer production
or social production, as it is sometimes
referred to which refers to the sharing of
information based on collaboration.
Benkler speaks of this concept from an economic perspective and relates it to the knowledge and information economy. He cites
examples like open-source software that
is, software released with its code available
to anyone to view and modify, among other
things serving as an alternative to products
from corporations such as Microsoft; as well
as Wikipedia as an alternative to encyclopedias.
If you strip away the economy factor and
look beyond how this is affecting industries
and their profits, the phenomenon reflects a
trend of collaboration and sharing of resources which goes back many years. One example
cited is peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, where
files are downloaded from multiple computers connected together.
In the age of social networking, users are

essentially doing the same thing. We may

move from network to network like how
weve abandoned Friendster and MySpace
and embraced Facebook and Twitter but
at the core of it, we are contributing to this
amazing source of information that the
Internet holds.
Every tweet we send out or blog entry we
write, each picture we upload or update we
post, is us pooling our resources and collaborating. Just look at how news and information is shared and consumed so easily and
effectively during crisis situations whether
it is the revolutions in the Middle East or an
earthquake in Japan.
This collaborative state also requires each
of us to make a decision: whether or not to be
a responsible Internet user and join in. We are
already taking advantage of this; each time
we read something on the World Wide Web,
or perform an online search, we are reaping
the benefits of this social production.
The responsibility doesnt just lie with the
individual; organisations share it too. The
onus may not be heavier on digital-based
companies than on other types after all,
everyone benefits but the expectation is
that such organisations should understand
this responsibility. This could also explain
the backlash over Instagram for introducing
a policy that went against this collaborative
culture which has existed through good faith.
After all, other than our devices and
Internet access, we dont actually pay to use
any of these services. While it is easy for these
organisations to look at users as products
that can be sold to advertisers (among other
people), it would be unfortunate if they dont
realise that it is also their users contributions
that benefit them.
n Niki is a writer, consultant and speaker on
media and digital culture. Connect with him at
http://blog.nikicheong.com or on Twitter via @
nikicheong. Suggest topics and issues on digital culture, or pose questions, via email or
on Twitter using the #Star2reWired hashtag.