If I had to pick one website that was absolutely essential to my existence, it would not be Facebook. I’ll give you a minute to absorb that, and then inform you that the heart and soul of my online experience is actually the wondrous Internet Movie Database (IMDb). In terms of presence of the Leviathan, one aspect of IMDb really stands out. Registered users can add, delete, and edit any aspect of a movie’s information page through the petition of the site’s official review team. This review team is not meant to control or shape how things on the site get edited, but rather exists to make sure people aren’t writing things that are offensive or malicious in some way. The true editorial power comes from the users themselves.
Because the only responsibility of the editorial team on IMDb is ensuring something resembling a family-friendly experience, and not on content, this job falls on the shoulders of the site’s individual members. The Leviathan, in this case, emerges out of what Wallace (1999) calls “our eagerness to preserve a productive online group environment” (p. 70). This collective desire for a reliable and respectable online resource leads to a heavily, voluntarily monitored database. My first experience with this came about two months after I became a registered member and had had two months to observe the general rules and behavior of users on the site. I was checking out the page for the greatest movie of all time, The Usual Suspects and noticed that two of the entries for the movie’s taglines were actually just lines from the movie. As a diehard fan, I couldn’t let that slip by, so I clicked on “Update” and submitted my two deletions, along with the reason they should be taken off. Less than 24 hours later, the two incorrect taglines were indeed gone, and I had a newfound sense of accomplishment.
It was this sense of accomplishment that really struck me as unique to the peer-edited nature of IMDb. The only true drive behind my actions was my desire to ensure that a movie I am completely obsessed with was represented correctly. While there may be the random user that feels it is their personal responsibility to ensure factual correctness in every entry on the site, I feel it is the idea of making sure one’s favorite movies and television shows are portrayed properly that is the true drive behind the collective effort towards a useful result. Out of this simple desire emerges the Leviathan, and the Leviathan in turn further influences new users to follow the social guidelines already in place.
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2 comments:
Hi Spencer, this is indeed a very informative post. The presence of the online Leviathan seems more and more important as these collaborative/interactive knowledge pool “Web 2.0” sites grow in popularity and functionality. Personally, the IMDb confused me, earlier I thought that it was run by a select group of film buffs, however, in recent years it seems to be similar (and almost identical in some “Trivia” entries) to Wikipedia. Now that I know it’s a peer-reviewed entry system, I completely agree with your analysis.
I believe that if everyone were allowed to edit the IMDb with no moderation, the site would be a complete mess. Every movie’s page would likely be the territory for opinion-based flame wars and the like. However, having the Leviathan impose two barriers (becoming a registered user followed by seeking peer approval), the productivity and efficiency must increase exponentially.
Spencer-
Great opening statement about how you could actually live without Facebook! That is indeed a hard notion to ponder over as the majority of college students use it to procrastinate a lot. I think that the IMDb website is a great idea and I will definitely be checking it out soon!
It was very interesting how you were almost the leviathan as an editor of the web page. I too wrote about how I felt as if I was the leviathan that I was hunting for as I too had this type of editing power over a Facebook group (yes, I am one of the many who cannot live without Facebook). I agree that people try to be reliable and respectable in a collective group as they do not want to go against that group’s norm because that is the image I tried to perceive by kicking out men who wrote chauvinistic remarks relating to my all women service group. I too felt a bit of satisfaction when I completed my first “permanently banned” from the group.
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