Life in the Network

I'm quite familiar with Wikipedia just as a site I occasionally browse for fun looking at random, useless information about stuff I like, but honestly, the thought of going in there and editing anything was kind of scary. For one thing, most of the articles I tend to look at have fairly detailed information already, and even if I did attempt to edit anything, how could I be sure what I'd be adding was relevant enough to be mentioned? This was the issue I faced when I created the account for this blog entry,and even when I tried the editing feature, I really wasn't sure how anything worked. Eventually, I worked up the courage to post the sentence "Additionally, posts made by fans in certain threads may also be aired during the block in the black and white bumps." under the Forum tab of the Adult Swim article, which can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_swim#Forum

So far, the sentence is still there, with no comments made in the discussion for the article yet, so I can only assume that means the edit went smoothly. I may still use the Wikipedia account to touch up random things in articles I may come across, but for now, I think I'll just stick to browsing.

Just by the sheer concept of advertising and its goals, pretty much any entry of some product or service could be construed as an advertisment for them since those articles by definition must inform readers about their subjects. After all, the consumer won't know to buy a product if he or she doesn't know what that product is. Wikipedia can certainly work in that way, as I can attest from personal experience. I first learned about that Subservient Chicken by, you guessed it, randomly coming across its article on Wikipedia one day. However, there are also differences in the style of writing used to entice or simply inform. Wikipedia's policy of neutrality in all articles is a definite step toward making the site a relevant information source and not one big collection of unofficial, user created ads. I can see this policy at work in the discussion section of the Adult Swim article with discussion threads about specific users trying to promote themselves, suggestions for criticisms, and other things. Despite this line between subjectivity and objectivity in information though, viral marketing campaigns like the Subservient Chicken have found ways to propagate themselves without the need for biased language. All it takes is for people to know about them, and then their curiosity is piqued automatically and the ad holds their interest long enough to make them aware of the product. As Brier says, the focus is on spreading the message, not incubating it (31). In this way, Wikipedia is essentially doing free advertising for Burger King by having the Subservient Chicken article, even though the article itself says nothing about Burger King aside from the fact that it's behind the site. This isn't so much a failure on Wikipedia's part to be objective, but more of a tactic by the advertisers to use this objectivity to their advantage.