用户可见性对大众生产的影响机制研究

How User Visibility Affects Peer Production

本文以百度百科为例,采用网络民族志与参与式观察法,从可见性视角探讨大众生产何以可能。研究发现,大众生产平台通过规则设定再分配用户活动数据,使用户可见性差异化。差异化可见建构出生产者与浏览者间以“看见”与“被看见”为形态的弱关系和生产者间以“竞争”“合作”为形态的强关系。强弱关系赋予用户生产以意义,构成用户投身生产的三种动力:因“观看关系”而强化的生产优质内容动力、基于“竞争关系”的生产更多内容的动力和基于“合作关系”的持续生产动力。“用户可见性—关系—动力”环环相扣,成就欣欣向荣的大众生产图景。本研究展现出多向度“关系”在解释大众生产机制中的张力,打破了平台—用户二者之间“控制—被控制”的二元论的局限。

Taking Baidu Encyclopedia as an example,from the perspective of visibility,this paper uses online ethnography and participatory observation to explore how the peer production is possible.It comes to conclusion that the peer production platform redistributes user activity data through rule setting,making user visibility different.Differentiation can be seen to construct a weak relationship between producers and viewers in the form of"seeing"and"being seen",and a strong relationship between producers in the form of"competition"and"cooperation".The relationship between strong and weak endows users with the meaning and constitutes three kinds of motivation for users to engage in peer production:producing high-quality content strengthened by"viewing relationship";producing more content based on"competitive relationship"and continuous production based on"cooperative relationship"."User visibility–relationship–motivation"is linked to each other,creating today's prosperous peer production landscape.This study sheds light on the tension of multiple relationships to explain how peer production is possible.And thus the dualism between platform and users is overstepped.