[Wikide-l] Enzensberger meets Wiki

Fr Mai 27 14:25:36 UTC 2005

http://container.zkm.de/ijie/ijie/no002/ijie_002_09_ebersbach.pdf

IJIE International Journal of Information Ethics Vol. 2 (11/2004) © by 
IJIE – all rights reserved www.ijie.org 1 ISSN 1614-1687 Anja 
Ebersbach-Markus Glaser
Towards Emancipatory Use of a Medium: The Wiki

Abstract:
With the rapid growth of the Internet in the 1990ies due to the WWW, 
many people’s hopes were raised that the spirit of egality, the 
emancipatory power of the medium then, would be brought to the masses. 
With the increasing commercialization, the net became and is becoming 
more and more a one-way medium for advertising. Against this 
development, a new form of web pages has emerged and is becoming 
increasingly popular: the Wiki. Its distinctive feature is that any web 
page can be edited by anyone. Participants attribute the success to this 
openness and to the resulting collective production of content. In his 
1970 article “Constituents of a theory of the media”, Enzensberger 
developed a list of seven criteria that qualify, in his opinion, the use 
of a medium as emancipatory. These are used to investigate the question: 
Can wikis be thought of as a new form of emancipatory use of the medium?