Conclusion
David Reed explains that in the early stages of a network like the Internet, when "content is king. . . . there is a small number of sources (publishers or makers) of content that every user selects from. The sources compete for users based on the value of their content" (qtd in Rheingold 61). As the network enables social interaction between groups, where "group-forming networks" occur, the value of the network increases exponentially (Rheingold 60). Meanwhile, content management systems, like Drupal, continue to increase the ease with which group-forming networks evolve, not only in order to serve the needs of users of their software, but also because the tool is incestuously the tool of its own construction. Unlike proprietary CMS's systems where developers may communicate locally, face-to-face, development communities like Drupal are distributed internationally; they depend upon the groupware capabilities of the software they produce--they eat their own dog food--to increase the efficiency of development and user support. On successful projects, the software must adapt to cope with the new challenges of growing user and developer communities. Thus, we feel it is likely, then, that as the Internet continues to expand as a self-organizing networked space, open source CMS's will similarly continue to evolve with ever-increasing emphasis on collaboration and community interaction. The term "content management" is no longer king.
Comments
content vs. form vs. society
Given Fish's Content vs. Form op-ed piece in the NYT, I wondered how you might think about those terms in the context of your Drupal work. His main assertion is this:
How might a similar notion apply to the social networks that you're defining? The conference proclaims, "Content [is] No Longer King" and presumably "Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration" are. What are the implications of this shift to a social center and away from content? Are there ways that this movement supports Fish's assertions? I'm certain this is not a polarity (e.g., it's not a content or no content scenario). Content still must play some role--can you talk about that role and how you see it relating to the more traditional tensions between content and form that composition teachers face?
Fish v. Shaugnessay v. Drupal et al
Or, is there a fish in this blog?
I'm not sure where I come down on this, but I suspect I'm a content over form person, ala Mina Shaugnessey's argument in Errors and Expectations. If there's no content, nothing being said, the form is useless, empty. At the same time, I can see that if students can wrap their head around a form, understand the role of the formal elements--say intro, body, conclusion for starters, perhaps various modes as forms--that can help them with the content, assuming they have some to work with.
As for working this into the conference theme, I'd say content fits in that writers, student and otherwise, aren't starting with content, at least not static content. Instead, the collaboration is about constructing the content, throwing out ideas, getting feedback, revamping them, and so on. Content isn't king because it is evolving over time and revision, rather than forcing the other elments, such as form, to bend around it. In some respects, and maybe this is over-simplified, that's why social constructivist approaches work so well with the teaching of writing and can be so readily enhanced with technology such as blogs and drupal.
So, while I don't know if I agree that content is no longer king, because we use these processes to produce better content in the end, I think that when we focus on the collaborative nature of writing and the way technology can facilitate that, along with facilitating the general construction of knowledge and understanding, then the concerns about content may more or less take care of themselves, being a by-product of collaboration and interaction. But that is possibly just a tired mind speculating at the end of a long week.
Bradley