Understanding Participatory Media Using Social Networks

Given the rapid growth of participatory media content such as blogs, user created videos, and podcasts, there is a need to understand and answer the following kind of questions: What is participatory media good for? Does it improve the effectiveness of news media? If so, then why? What are the underlying processes of human communication that can explain how people perceive and interpret the information they gain from participatory media? How can this understanding be used to design better information search and recommendation systems for the Internet? We try to answer these questions by examining participatory media through models built using social networks of people. We first give a few examples of participatory media which indicate that participation by people in online public discourse through blogs and forums can indeed improve the effectiveness of news media: it helps people gain a better understanding of topics discussed in mass media, and presents people with diverse viewpoints to avoid media bias. We then use social networks to propose a model for the underlying processes of communication to answer why and how participatory media would improve the effectiveness of news media. An investigation methodology is then outlined for validation of the model, and validation results from user-surveys and measurements done on an online social networking website are presented. Our results are positive and indicate that a social network based framework offers a plausible approach to the design of useful applications for participatory media.