Final Presentation Research Post #2 from Dawson Smith

 Part 2: Quora’s Cultural Shift (Meme and Humour Culture)

Quora’s accepting transition of the application intended use is a very modern outlook and disagrees with Ben Light, Jean Burgess, and Stefanie Duguay’s “environment of expected use” (2016, 889). According to these authors, applications; vision, operating model, and governance is what configures the integration of intended use. Although this initially was the objective for Quora, what changed was governance; “how the app provider seeks to manage and regulate user activity to sustain their operating model and fulfil their vision” (Light et al., 2016, 890). Their vision was no longer the only desire the platform could achieve, users restructured the culture and consequently changed the future vision of Quora. Because users placed the value of exchanging knowledge to a minimum, the meme and entertainment culture was able to flourish. In sequence to this, Quora did not fight their users of this shift. Rather welcomed mechanisms to prefer the users. Therefore going against the idea; “Governance may expand from simply managing user activity to enforcing norms and values. Apps may enlist users in enforcing governance through mutual surveillance facilitated by reporting systems” (Light et al., 2016, 890). Algorithms only enhanced this transformation. 

(Amatriain, 2021)

The argument that can be made behind Quora’s reasoning for this is; because the majority of Quora’s users desired a culture shift, if they did not restrict anything that regarded the shift, then Quora would maintain its users. Although this did not benefit all its users it was a way Quora could modernize and maintain users within its platform.









References

Amatriain, X. (2021). Why is my Quora feed just full of memes? I feel like older content was much more informative. Quora. Retrieved December 8, 2022, from https://www.quora.com/Why-is-my-Quora-feed-just-full-of-memes-I-feel-like-older-content-was-much-more-informative

Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2016). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of

            apps. New Media & Society, 20(3), 881-900. 10.1177/1461444816675438

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