I acknowledge that the title I have chosen is rather broad. So I think I’d like to start off by sketching out the landscape, sort of painting a picture using very broad brush strokes … and then perhaps to suggest one case study in order to begin to flesh out more details.
The entire Internet (well, at least the Internet I am aware of) is governed by rules and regulations. Some parts moreso than others, but for every “user” the very first decision they must make is which set of rules and regulations to choose. For many decades, perhaps even ever since someone actually remembers making such a decision, this choice was rather simple and straightforward:
Always choose .COM
Advice repeated so often it ought make people sick to hear it yet again
I will now jump to the chase and simply point out that many people similarly choose Google or Facebook or Youtube or Spotify or Microsoft or Linux or Grok or Anthropic or whatever other sort of “solution” to a rather complex set of issues to select an environment in which to engage … with a community of people who have made the same (or at least similar enough) choices to whatever they have chosen themselves … essentially “choosing a playing field”.
The playing field is essentially the environment for all interaction with information. Indeed, most people who are active at all will probably be active among many playing fields, and many if not outright most people will not even realize that each of these playing fields has quite restrictive limitations, and / or that none of these playing fields are equivalent to TEH INTERNET.
Now (as an example, and maybe also as the beginning of a sort of “case study”) I will focus on one such playing field: WordPress.
WordPress is probably the largest online community devoted to the written word. I am actually not sure whether the community is first and foremost about “open source” or whether the “open source” aspects or WordPress are the result of its community’s very strong enthusiasm for creativity and creative expression in any and all forms. At this point, the project seems so humungous, that saying almost anything about it reminds me of that image of a blindfolded scientist who is unable to tell whether they are touching an elephant’s trunk or tail.
My gut feeling is that whereas at least 99% of the users of WordPress use it to publish, at most 1% users of WordPress use it to read. I say that even though I know that WordPress content is actually dynamically “created” ever time someone enter the address to view content hosted using WordPress. In my humble opinion, that is roughly equivalent to pointing out that users of printed paper documents use a light source to read them. This distinction between literacy skills and publicacy skills is usually incomprehensible to most of my audiences. [1]
Even though I notice that some in the WordPress community are enthusiastic about their engagement and participation in the community, I also notice that the technological support for such communicative engagement and participation is luckluster at best and usually rather suboptimal and sometimes even quite shoddy. One good example of this is the way RSS feeds are propagated throughout WordPress’s own systems. Some RSS feeds seem to be updated more frequently than others, resulting in non-level playing fields among community members seeking to engage and participate level playing fields. Nonetheless, I am still optimistic enough to feel that when I am able to bring this (“bug”?) to the attention of people responsible for the regulation of WordPress technology, they will address the issue and maybe even fix it. 🙂
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