Database Reference
In-Depth Information
1.6 Social Web and Critical Challenges
Social media has exponentially increased the scale and pattern of information
exchange on the Internet. It provides a network platform that allows individuals
and groups to interact more immediately and on a much larger scale than ever
before. However, the influence of social media can also be deemed as a double-
edged sword. While social media has opened new channels and opportunities for
individuals, social groups, and professional knowledge communities, the same
technologies can also be exploited in a destructive way by individuals and groups
to propagate misinformation, propaganda, violence, defamation, and threats. Social
media creates an open forum for anyone to post any personal, social, and political
views in various forms such as photographs, videos, podcasts, articles, and blogs.
It also involves many different individuals and societies with different social views,
moral standards, ethics, cultures, and codes of conducts. Content that is acceptable
to one individual or group may not necessarily be accepted equally by another
individual or group. In addition, the degree of censorship may vary from place to
place because some countries have stricter laws regarding the nature of content that
can be posted on the Internet. Organizations and governments are confronted with
the issue of striking a balance between the social costs on the one hand and
employees' and citizens' rights to free speech on the other.
Below we review some of the critical issues surrounding Web 2.0 sites and their
operations which are broadly applicable to many different types of knowledge
communities whether organizational, health care, research, or software development
communities.
1.6.1
Information Retrieval
Many online communities allow their members to post multimedia objects that may
include text messages, pictures, and video or audio files that are eventually stored
as part of an online archive. These multimedia contents are “tagged” with textual
descriptions for subsequent searches and retrieval. For instance, a picture of a sym-
ptom of a particular ailment may be uploaded on a health site and may be described
with a tag. However, these tags often fail to fully describe the multimedia objects.
As a result, information retrieval based on text-based queries may not yield desired
outcomes [ 25 ]. Moreover, many members of these online communities engage
in exploratory searches, as opposed to using specific keyword searches. These
exploratory searches (often called information foraging behavior) require a type of
information retrieval tool different from what is usually available to these online
communities [ 26 ]. As a result, many new research efforts have been directed toward
creating information retrieval tools that can accommodate various types of online
searches (see, e.g., [ 27 , 28 ]).
In addition, even with the ability to search using text-based queries, people from
different backgrounds may understand similar concepts using different textual
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