Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Cops 2.0 IRC Chat (Essay 2)

Over the past couple of weeks, I have observed a specific Internet Relay Chat. An IRC is a social medium that allows users to chat amongst each other synchronously. Although there are many IRC's available on the Internet, I chose to observe one that I am very familiar with and have a strong interest in. This IRC is known as "Cops 2.0." This social medium works in congruence with the television show "Cops" on G4TV. At the bottom of this television show is a box that contains information regarding what is occurring in the episode. It asks a variety of questions that allows users in the IRC to answer. When the user answers the questions pertaining to the episode, the host then chooses these specific answers randomly to display in the information box at the bottom of the television show. From what I have observed, I have seen many users act as "Free riders" who answering questions in a spamming fashion. These "Free riders" are taking away the enjoyment and interests of those who want to use the IRC correctly, and for those who want to discuss the police activity occurring on the episode.

The reading "Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities" by Peter Kollock and Marc Smith gives a very good description of what a "Free rider" does in these social media. Kollock and Smith both state that "Free riders" contribute useless information to the social media in order to obtain a public good. A public good, as stated by Kollock and Smith, "Is a resource from which all may benefit."(p.110) In the Cops 2.0 channel, the free riders answer questions in a jokingly spamming fashion in order to get their answers up on the information box on the television show. In other words, they are trying to get their humorous answer displayed on television by overriding many other's answers. The free riding that occurs in this situation, is the consistent spamming of idiotic answers and the public good that they are trying to obtain is their displayed answer on television. The problem here is that the questions that are being asked are relating to the police activity that is occurring in the episode of Cops. I have seen this occur in all five of my observation days. For example in my first day of observation on Septemeber 16th, the question "How would you clear a room?" was asked. This was asked because during the episode the Police needed to vacate a room where a crime has occurred. So I expected people to answer that question with answers like "Call in the K-9 Unit" or "Call for backup to vacate the premises." Instead you saw answers like "I'd call Arnold," "Throw a gas bomb," and "With my mutt." All these answers were displayed on television because they were constantly spammed, so the host randomly selected them because of the vast amount answered in the chat. During my final day of observation on September 23rd, I decided to answer a question in regard to what was occurring in the episode in a non-spamming fashion. The question "How would you handle this situation?" was asked. I stated, "I would call my superior, tell him my situation, and follow his orders." As i posted this answer, it was quickly overrun by the idiot spammers and was not displayed on television. This is very similar to Professor Stromer-Galley's blog post, titled "Experimenting with IRC." She stated that during the experimentation, users were not discussing anything, but just random things were being posted. She stated that she tried asking questions in order to refocus the discussion, but she was mostly overridden by the free riders who were posting nonsense. This is very similar to my answer being overridden by the free riders for a spot on television.

Although the reading by Kollock and Smith did not provide examples of free riders existing in Internet Relay Chats, my observations are still comparabe to what had occurred in Usenet. Kollock and Smith both state that "No central Authority manages Usenet"(p.111) Kollock and Smith had mentioned that Usenet free riders would post long articles and meaningless off topic spam in order to obtain the public good. During my observations, specifically the first, I noticed a lot of users getting booted from the channel when they answered the questions with curse words. This is the only central authority I saw within the channel. It still allowed users to spam meaningless information just like Usenet. I also found in my observations that there were no regular users who try and regulate the conduct displayed in the chat. As stated by Kollock and Smith, this is something that Usenet has in order to try and eliminate the free riders. They mention "Each contribution is passed throughout the system of interconnected hosts."(p.111)

Although this problem may not exist in other IRC channels, or may be declining as time progresses, but from my observations I have found that the Cops 2.0 IRC channel contains a majority of these free riders. These free riders ruin the channel for the people who want to use it correctly, in their own selfishness. It is very hard participate in the IRC channel when people aren't answering questions in regard to what the episode is portraying. I believe that these free riders give the channel a bad name and may discontinue users who want to use it correctly.

Blibliography

Kollock, P. and Smith, M. (1996). Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer communities. In S. C. Herring (Ed.), Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives (p. 109-129). Philidelphia, PA: John Benjamins.

http://www.g4tv.com/cops.chat.html

http://com430z.blogspot.com/
Stromer-Galley, J. (2008). Experimenting with IRC


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