Viewpoint: Web 2.0 and the ‘naming of parts’

Nick Buckley
Director of New Social Media at GfK NOP

I started out writing about the different ways in which market research can respond to Web 2.0, but then I was struck by what I was doing – I was analysing, breaking the question down into parts in order to apply logic to evaluating and understanding the options. Researchers do that routinely with data and evidence, segmenting and taxonomising in search of connections and causation. We also deftly reduce arrays of open-ended responses to some kind of order – and call it ‘coding’. Importantly, these are also ways we seek to make data finite and containable, thus offering our clients equally tractable models of a bigger and messier world.

I thought of Henry Reed’s poem ‘The naming of parts’ (2008/1942), written from the perspective of an infantry recruit receiving basic rifle training. Everything has a name, handed down with authority, to be intoned by the NCO instructor: ‘This is the lower sling swivel. And this is the upper sling swivel.’ Shared consistent labelling is necessary to efficient instruction,prior to more serious matters such as firing the rifle, killing people and fighting wars. For Reed it symbolises regimentation, a common frame of reference giving less scope for misunderstanding, but also for disagreement, independence or initiative.

Proponents of Web 2.0 make much about the ‘top down’ naming of parts, ‘taxonomy’, in the old days before Web
2.0 set users free from a closed set of navigational and functional options, and thus of ‘normal’ tasks and ways of interacting. They contrast this with emergent ‘folksonomy’ where users exercise great freedom to label, group and tag things, and therefore to carve up, and contemplate, the world their way. ‘Bottom up’ folksonomy came to symbolise the purported democratic nature of Web 2.0 – putting the user in charge. This is what attracts some researchers: the new ways of removing limitations on what respondents tell us, or how, and thus letting them take us outside our own habitual thought boxes. We have learned to talk about letting go, or about following where respondents, nay ‘participants’, take us.

This is all very laudable, and there is a growing corpus of literature about the benefits of working this way. But what happens when we need to take those undisciplined outputs back to the client? At what point do we reimpose our own ‘naming of parts’ in order to make the model containable and actionable? I think this is going to be one of the biggest challenges to us as researchers, learning to judge when and how to convert rich content back to simpler properties and variables, without losing the insights or the creativity that Web 2.0 promises.

There is also a radical answer to consider. Elsewhere in this issue, I have written a review of We Are Smarter Than Me (Libert & Spector 2008),which is full of examples of ‘crowdsourcing’ – using large groups of internet- connected people to do much more than offer opinions or product ideas. For a radical crowdsourcer the answer to my question may be that you never refine your ‘data’ to simpler analyses,nor do you reduce the final picture to one that a single individual can see in its entirety. Instead you allow the crowd to continue the process … distributing the labour of comprehension and response among the many.

Without necessarily going that far we need to think hard about when and why we impose our analysis on what we encourage others to create – thus securing a future role for market researchers in making Web 2.0 communities and conversations work for our clients. After all, in Herbert Reed’s poem, the scheduled topic for the next day is, ‘What to do after firing’!

Reference
Libert, B. & Spector, J. (2008) We Are Smarter Than Me. New Jersey: Wharton School Publishing.
Reed, H. (2008/1942) The naming of parts. Retrieved from www.solearabiantree.net/namingofparts/namingofparts.html.

International Journal of Market Research 50(5), 2008

Would you like to respond to this Viewpoint? Or perhaps you have an idea for another? Responses and new submissions are welcome. They should be emailed to the IJMR, where they'll be considered for publication.

What's New - Membership - Company Partner Service - Members' Area - Code/Guidelines - Qualifications - Training - Awards
Events - Networking - Publications - Media Info - Market Research - Search - Site Map - A-Z Directory - Contact Us - Home