Social networking sites offer a greater chance for public participation in information sharing. This benefits the individual because, as internet access is generally more available than public access TV and community media projects (i.e. nearly every town has some sort of internet provider, but not all towns have community media organizations), the individual can more relay their ideas to an audience.

However, preference of social networking sites over community media projects largely depends on what the individual would like to accomplish. On one hand, information websites make it easier for individuals to find a specific piece of information. The "Google Image Tagger," for example, helps make images more accessible to individuals by tagging them under multiple categories. Cognitively, this is much how concepts are represented in the human mind: under multiple categories and network connections of keywords. Thus, just as in the mind, it is easier to recall a piece of information with the more connections and "tag words" one related with it, it is easier to find a piece of information on the internet the more tags you can use to search for it.

If your purpose is not to search for a piece of information, though, but rather to create a participatory project, community media may be a more useful outlet (depending on your audience). The website "Crying While Eating" makes it very easy for individuals to submit their own clips and be published on the website. However, as it enlarges its sense of 'community' to the global community, there is a possibility that the site will get lost among the multitude of sites on the internet and not reach its intended audience. With community media and public access TV, there is a greater chance that the members of one community will all view the project. NOTE: This is a bad example, though - there's little chance that the majority of people in a local community will be interested in "Crying While Eating"; the site probably does gain its optimal audience on the web. A better example might be discourse about a city initiative.

Finally, some of the required reading on the internet talked about the sort of majority-oppressing-minority censorship that occurs online, such as with flagging. These authors seemed rather cynical and, in my opinion, overestimated the amount of harmful flagging that actually goes on. Additionally, while making one's information hard to find on the internet does censor it in a way, most information is pretty hard to find as it is. It would be interesting to see in a study how such flagging and attempts at "censorship" actually did affect visitation to a site. For the most part, I believe that the internet is a great place for free expression, given that an individual knows where to look. A good example of this is the Whitney's "World's First Collaborative Sentence." Such a project would not have been possible anywhere but the internet, where it is much easier to process and store such a vast amount of information.

- Katie