Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age: Coping with Information, Participation, and Collaboration Overload

Overview The spread of social computing, cloud computing, Internet of Things, and co-creation tools pushes the use of technology towards a more social dimension and toward the creation of enormous quantity of data. This great mole of data may lead the users to feel overwhelmed and, on the long period, may lead to disaffection towards the use of technologies – because considered too time consuming and not easy to visualize, analyze, and exploit. But information overload is not the only problem: participation and collaboration overload may lead to sever problems in communication. A high level of complexity in participation and collaboration is most of the time cause of more time consumption and engagement difficulties. Therefore, information, participation, and collaboration overload emerge as serious problems when we design Web, mobile, wearable, and pervasive applications that enable collaborative user experiences through End-User Development (EUD) and co-creation approaches. EUD, and specifically the required active engagement in cultures of participation, open up unique new opportunities for mass collaboration and social production, but they are not without drawbacks. One such drawback is that humans may be forced to cope with the burden of being active contributors in personally irrelevant activities leading to a participation overload. " Do-it-yourself " societies empower humans with powerful tools, however they force them to perform many tasks themselves that were done previously by skilled domain workers serving as agents and intermediaries. Although this shift provides power, freedom, and control to customers, it also has urged people to act as contributors in contexts for which they lack the experience that professionals have at their disposal. More experience and assessment is required to determine the design trade-offs for specific contexts and application domains in which the advantages of cultures of participation (such as extensive coverage of information, creation of large numbers of artifacts, creative chaos by making all voices heard, reduced authority of expert opinions, and shared experience of social creativity) will outweigh the disadvantages (accumulation of irrelevant information, wasting human resources in large information spaces, and lack of coherent voices). Co-creation is grounded on new forms of constructive interaction among all relevant stakeholders in society: academia, government at all levels, business, the third sector, and citizens. All these actors collaborate in creative processes of delivering innovation based on principles of participation, empowerment and mutual responsibility. Through engaging citizens to redesign and remake their environment and communities can lead to improved outcomes …