The New Work of Composing

Interactions with others help us figure out who we are and where we belong in a community. In online communities, the information users input and share is connected to their identity and their reputations within the site. In an increasingly mobile society, users belong to numerous communities across various social media, building identities and reputations in each one. As users participate in numerous social media sites, they bring their “friends” with them. Because social media is experiencing a boom, there are always “new” social media sites popping up, encouraging participation and recruitment of other users and contacts. Social media interfaces encourage users to recruit their contacts and friends to join and participate in the service. Sites like GoodReads and Facebook enable users to import their email address list from their Gmail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and AOL accounts. Contacts already using the service are automatically added, and those who are not receive an email prompt to join. This is another way that users are encouraged to bring their offline lives and collective identities (in this case, in the form of offline contacts) into online spaces. For example, all of my friends on Facebook are people I know offline, which shouldn’t be surprising considering Facebook originated as a way to connect college students attending the same university. My Facebook networks, however, stretch beyond my university. I am connected to my brother and his friends, as well as a few friends from high school. Many colleagues in the field of computers and writing and digital rhetoric also have a Facebook presence, and my network extends to their groups and connections. None of my contacts reflected on Facebook derive solely from my experiences online; rather, each contact is someone I know, typically someone with whom I interact on a regular basis. When I began using GoodReads (a service where users archive what they are reading, post user reviews, and offer suggestions to their contacts), I realized many of my Facebook contacts from graduate school were also using the service. The same is true for me of Twitter. And while not all of my contacts use both services, many connections exist in multiple spaces simultaneously. As I discover other social media I want to explore, I can bring my contacts from other social media spaces with me. In a geophysical neighborhood or community, relocating often means leaving friends and neighbors behind. But in the digital neighborhood, you can simply invite them to join you in the online location you’ve discovered. In this way, collective identity intensifies as it is spread out over a number of sites, raising the stakes regarding social reputation. In Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, a recent Wired article, Chris Anderson (2008) described participation in the form of user-generated content as “labor exchange” (n.p.). He explained, “the act of using the service creates something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful elsewhere” (n.p.). Anderson suggested that the incentive to contribute content is inherent in the spirit of exchange; users are provided a service for free and they want to a) maintain the service, ensuring it stays free and b) share useful information with others, thereby improving the service. He also suggested user-generated content is part of the reputation economy. ^[1] In a reputation economy, users work (generate content, archive information, collect links, providing troubleshooting advice) for reputational rather than economic gain. Social reputations are contextual and complex, particularly for members of a group or community. A reputation economy works as part of what Pierre Bourdieu called social capital. Social capital describes the circumstances in which individuals can use membership in groups and networks to secure some kind of benefit. Bourdieu (1986) explained,

Social capital is an attribute of an individual in a social context. One can acquire social capital through purposeful actions and can transform social capital into conventional economic gains. The ability to do so, however, depends on the nature of the social obligations, connections, and networks available to you. (p. 241)

Members of a community want to be well-respected; they want their opinions to matter. When suggesting a place to stay or a restaurant to visit on a budget, the advice has a real world consequence, as other users/readers will base their decisions on such advice. Thus, because users contributing to social media have their reputations at stake, they are compelled to supply other users with useful information. In return, their reputation and their identities among the community stay intact. In a reputation economy, information about other users’ reputations spreads quickly so that if you violate other users’ trust, it will affect your reputation throughout entire networks of people. Whether it is conscious or not, those providing advice and generating other content for social media are getting something out of the process as they construct their collective identities.