Individualization= Collaboration

As we were saying, people are now well-versed in living the individualized life. But in terms of what is happening online, the interesting part is how we go about individualization these days. It seems that while individualization - as a way of life- has matured, it has done so almost to the point of transforming itself as a concept. Today, ironically, it seems the most efficient way of making sure one’s individual needs are met is to collaborate with others!

Building online communities to meet individual needs

We wanted to know more about the reasoning behind why people contribute online and maintain online communities. Some interesting comments have been made on the blog about people contributing online purely to boost their personal ego and seek online fame. While it did emerge from our ethnography sessions that a sense of personal gratification was gained from sharing one’s personal information and opinion, the motivation seemed to go much further than a simple case of ego-boost.

In a world where we are so accustomed to being bombarded by information and manipulated by spin doctors, the uploaders are seeking to inform themselves and others in order to reduce the risk of bad decision-making that might negatively impact on their lives. The best way of ensuring you are one step ahead of the rest is to have the maximum and widest range of knowledge possible at your fingertips so that you can learn from other people’s mistakes and in turn improve the existing data for future reference. This is why uploaders consult more sources of information on average. In short, knowledge collaboration in communities optimizes efficiency; it is best survival practice and is of equal benefit to the individual and the community.

But while it is true that for a community to remain on top of things all members need to feed in, some people seem to be feeding more than others. When profiling uploaders and their motivations, we found that uploaders hold a special social function. They are undoubtedly social leaders and were proven to possess more opinion leadership on average, but they were also strikingly community-minded as they are members of more online AND offline communities, and are more driven by personal values.

We might conclude that while uploaders evidently do what they do out of personal interest, in this day and age personal and community interest seem to be fused. In this sense, today’s context means that the more community-minded a social leader is, the more effective they will be.

Comments

[Lucinda Dunn]

Indeed, the irony of the basic human condition is unchanged: we compete with each other for supremacy and to distinguish ourselves from the herd but without the herd we cannot exist (or survive) as individuals.
However while biological reality remains the same, societal reality- the common rules by which we ostensibly relate to each other- does mutate, and this difference can be felt in our everyday experiences.
Previously people relied more on anonymous superstructures like the State/Nation/Queen or institutions like political parties, educational establishments or even social classes to- almost blindly- anchor their social identities in. Nowadays, people seem to be personalizing their consumption in an attempt to establish more individualized social identities. For example, one of our uploader interviewees told how she would buy a well-known bike brand, only to cover over the label with diamante stickers- just to make it her own. The ability to brand oneself through a personalized blog or MySpace account seems part of the same phenomenon.
So social existence is becoming ostensibly more individualized, and with this a visible reorganization of the herd is already occurring through the mushrooming of thousands of interconnected online communities that support it. People online are connecting and assimilating with many more people than before, they are crossing geographical and social boundaries; they are connecting as individuals, but are using their newfound individual capabilities of expression and communication to understand each other’s needs more closely, thereby allowing society to collaborate more effectively en masse.

[Daria Radota Rasmussen]

I don't think this is any new phenomena. It is enough to look at the evolution. We could never survive without collaborating with others. Collaboration is the part of our nature, we just want to believe we are individualistic, that we are more special. But the truth is we are just memebers of human herd.