This study examines the motivations of participants in networked, large-scale content production and research a paradigm of distributed work magnified by the Internet. This has come to be called crowdsourcing. The approach taken in examining the crowdsourcing paradigm is of retrospection, with a study focused on observed examples and existing theories. Thirteen cases of existing crowdsourcing sites were selected for study, from a larger sample of 300. These cases were coded by their site properties and analyzed, identifying possible motivational mechanisms. Subsequent interviews with eight medium to heavy Internet users further explored these features, with an emphasis on ranking relative importance of various motivators. This study concludes with a series of recommendations on motivating crowds in such projects, emphasizing among others the importance of topical interest, ease of participation, and appeals to the individuals knowledge. In addition to base motivators, a number of support, or secondary, motivators are outlined.

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In this study I use critical discourse analysis on two different social platforms, Reddit and Battlefields own social platform, where I look for discourses around gamers and masculinity. I use the R.W Connells theories around hegemonic masculinity and E.K Sedgwicks theories around Homosociality to read my material. What I found was that even though a lot of research has found that it is quite balanced between the sexes who uses digital games, the social picture is still that it is something that men use and take part of, and part of why people still look at gamers as men is because a lot of women don’t feel welcomed in the community.

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Ragnarök Online en plats på nätet, ett online-spel, där människor från hela världen möts och samverkar. Det är i detta möte personer emellan som den virtuella miljön Ragnarök Online skapas. Målet med denna uppsats är att visa på hur människor interagerar i, och skapar denna plats på nätet. Varför spenderar folk tid i virtuella miljöer? Är det annorlunda att agera i en virtuell miljö? Dessa är några av de frågor vi kommer att möta i texten. Detta kommer vi att göra tillsammans med invånarna i Ragnarök Online, med dem kommer vi att slåss, jaga och göra hattar. Tillsammans kommer vi att utforska den virtuella miljön av Ragnarök Online. / Ragnarök Online a place on the net, an online game, where people from all over the world meet and interact. In this meeting the virtual environment of Ragnarök Online is created. Because it’s in the meeting between people this virtual place is founded. The goal of this essay is to show how people interact in, and create this place on the net. Why do people spend time in virtual environments? Is it any different to act in a virtual environment? These are some of the questions we will meet in the text. This we will do together whit the inhabitants of this place, we will fight, hunt and make hats ­­– together we will explore the virtual environment of Ragnarök Online.

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The Age of Trump witnessed the visible rise of intense culture wars and polarization in the United States. While culture wars are not new phenomena, the current iteration has digital media acting as new discursive structures and mediating battlegrounds for all sides of the cultural conflict. This project chronicles these online culture wars, demonstrating how within a neoliberal and postmodern socio-cultural condition, the rise of ambivalent, profit-driven digital technologies and platforms structure affect and mediate newly networked neo-reactionary populist (sub)cultural ideologies and discourses. The resulting online ecosystems afforded the digital formations of obscure reactionary subcultures (trolls, antifeminists, the alt-right, etc.) with particular personalized and affectively driven memetic communicative logics. These reactionary affective publics eventually began converging under perceived common ideological and social interests as online actions and reactionary discursive (re)formations and (re)networkings were catalyzed by (sub/cross)cultural conflicts and moments of sentimental activation. This led to the emergence of affectively charged and informally networked reactionary publics which began spilling out into the offline world alongside Trump's ascendancy to the White House. The increasing progressive reactions during the Trump Era also faced limitations in combatting reactionary politics due to structural dynamics of digital media and the larger culture war filtering of politics. The overall macro function of these new online culture wars is the bipartisan obfuscation and undermining of a collectivist and materialist reality and engagement with politics in the favor of a more personalized, symbolic and affective engagement that is indicative of the neoliberalized postmodern era.

The significance of technology and technological devices in the modern western society is steadily expanding, and affecting how the consumers of these products interact with one another. Both through these devices, but also how they interact without them the importance of studying these forms of interaction is therefore of rising significance. This thesis explores the world of online-gaming in order to map out how the players use, and are affected by the virtual aspects of the platform they use to create and reproduce their social bonds with one another. By analysing the relationship between the virtual and the actual it is possible to shed light on the potentials as well as the limits of online communication. The thesis purpose is to add to a deeper understanding within the anthropological discipline for interpersonal interaction within the frames of virtual spaces. The research has been conducted through a qualitative ethnographic field study with a guild of players who interact through the game World of Warcraft. This thesis will show that there is a strong interaction between the virtual worlds and the actual world. Thus it is possible for events that occurred in either space to affect the player.

Author: Ellen Hedin   Tutor: Ingegerd Rydin   Title: Computer Games as Culture – A qualitative study of the institutionalizing, cultivating, and socially constructing elements of computer game usage Subject: Media and Communication Studies Year: 2009 Purpose: The purpose of the study is to explore the creation of identities related to the interaction mediated through the use of computer games. By perceiving computer game playing as a form of social interaction, searching for the relations between actors and their function, I hope to find that the social features of computer game playing can nurture a self-confident, healthy identity as well as enchancing the players’ quality of life. Method: The methods used are interview, narrative interview and observation. Conclusions: The study concludes that there is a visible culture surrounding computer games that enrich the players’ quality of life as well as enriching their personas through institutionalizing, cultivating and socializing processes. Keywords: Computer, computer game, usage, online culture, communication, gaming, play, dota, gamer, popular culture, reception, young adults, new medium, modern technology, every-day-life.

The aim for this study is to investigate how the website archiveofourown.org dedicates itself to archiving and organizing fanfiction. This study aims to find answers for how archiveofourown makes fanfiction accessible for the fanfiction community, both in the present time and in its function as an archive. Building from Derrida's thoughts about how power control what is archived and therefore the exclusion from archives is a threat to de-mocracy. Paired with the idea from De Kosnik about fanfiction archives archiving a part of media that does not exist this essay will argue for the importance of the free-form tagging of meta-data in correlation to user-uploaded fanfiction on www.archiveofourown.org and the archiving of said meta-data as well as fanfiction. The thesis also discusses the importance for fandom-community to own their archives due to censorship and accessibility. In this thesis the concept of gender as a performative discourse is important to the understanding of women's labour in fanfiction communities.Material for this study have been gathered from the website archiveofourown.org during the spring of 2020. By doing a close reading of the material published by the site and the users the study presents how the tagging sys-tem works and analyses the findings with help of previous research. The results of this study show that the free form tagging system of metadata is important for the fanfiction community. By allowing this form of tagging the culture of the online space can be preserved. This study finds that most producers and consumers of fanfic-tion identify as female, and therefore argues that the use of volunteer work on a site with material by and for female is problematic due to the issue that feminine coded values, like organizing and flexibility, suggests that the work is less technical and such less masculine than it would otherwise be perceived.According to the findings of this study the tagging systems of metadata has an important part in preserving internet history of those that may not have it preserved otherwise. It is also preserving part of other internet cultures such as the tagging culture on websites like tumblr.com. This is a two-year master's thesis in archival science. The aim for this study is to investigate how the website archiveofourown.org dedicates itself to archiving and organizing fanfiction. This study aims to find answers for how archiveofourown makes fanfiction accessible for the fanfiction community, both in the present time and in its function as an archive. Building from Derrida’s thoughts about how power control what is archived and therefore the exclusion from archives is a threat to democracy. Paired with the idea from De Kosnik about fanfiction archives archiving a part of media that does not exist this essay will argue for the importance of the free-form tagging of meta-data in correlation to user-uploaded fanfiction on www.archiveofourown.org and the archiving of said meta-data as well as fanfiction. The thesis also discusses the importance for fandom-community to own their archives due to censorship and accessibility. In this thesis the concept of gender as a performative discourse is important to the understanding of women’s labour in fanfiction communities. Material for this study have been gathered from the website archiveofourown.org during the spring of 2020. By doing a close reading of the material published by the site and the users the study presents how the tagging system works and analyses the findings with help of previous research. The results of this study show that the free form tagging system of metadata is important for the fanfiction community. By allowing this form of tagging the culture of the online space can be preserved. This study finds that most producers and consumers of fanfiction identify as female, and therefore argues that the use of volunteer work on a site with material by and for female is problematic due to the issue that feminine coded values, like organizing and flexibility, suggests that the work is less technical and such less masculine than it would otherwise be perceived. According to the findings of this study the tagging systems of metadata has an important part in preserving internet history of those that may not have it preserved otherwise. It is also preserving part of other internet cultures such as the tagging culture on websites like tumblr.com. This is a two-year master’s thesis in archival science.