How do communites evaluate quality

How in actual fact do online communities evaluate quality?

In one of the unit readings from Bruns I found an interesting take on the manner in which certain communities evaluate quality. He states that, "its means of evaluating content and contributors and extracting from the overall mass of information and participants those most likely to have an interesting, useful, constructive contribution to make " (Bruns, 2008, 77). This is an interesting avenue for the discussion on quality control. He was looking at the implications of the need for quality work in the online genres. The particular article that this citation was pulled from takes predominantly about citizen journalism and blogging. These are two mediums of online distribution that are of vital interest to the study of media communication, as they are both entrenched in the evolving New Media environment.

These online communities have a power to be an independent voice from the mainstream channels of media communication. This can be seen in one of my later blogs, Citizen Journalism. Therefore there is a need for these communities to have a stringent control of the quality of work that is being distributed. For these works have a responsibility to be a viable alternative to mainstream media, with a demand for quality journalistic work. This is both in terms of an un-biased presentation of the matter, and a high level of written or verbal communication. "If a reputation system is honest and well–designed, information filtering using a huge pool of individuals can be more stable, reliable, and insightful than the opinions of a small group of gatekeepers or pundits"(Masum and Yi-Cheng Zhang, 2004).

This is a good quote to end the discussion with as it speaks of gatekeepers who were traditionally the maintainers of quality in the old media environment.

References

Bruns, Axel. (2008). News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: Perpetual Collaboration in Evaluating the News in Bruns. Axel, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, New York: Peter Lang, pp.69-100 Hassan Masum and Yi-Cheng Zhang, “Manifesto for the Reputation Society,” First Monday 9.7 (July 2004), http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/ (accessed 27 Feb. 2007),