First Fives

First Fives

During our opening class meeting, August 21, everyone created a list of five sites or platforms associated principally with the phrase “in digital environments.” Time runs out, so we didn’t have much opportunity to talk about the environments, specifically, nor generally, but I returned to them today, Tuesday, with the goal of sorting them and considering patterns. There are eleven of us in the group, if you count me, so that means 55 digital environments altogether. To clean up the list, I made into exact matches phrases like “GoogleDrive,” where perhaps one person had listed “Google Suite” and another had listed “Gmail.” This grouping applied to “Twitter” and “X,” also, which I combined into “XTwitter.” The only remaining split was for “Wikipedia” and “Wikis,” since those aren’t quite a neat match. I left them separate, in spirt of Venn diagram overlaps.

With 55 items altogether, the list reduced to 25 unique environments. This suggests a quality of commonness and uniqueness from each contributor.

Figure 1. A screen capture from TagCrowd, where I entered the list of environments after cleaning them to ensure that phrases would match and, thereby, tally together.

The TagCrowd weighted list (or word cloud) is confirmatory in that it reads back concentrations and anomalies in the set. Eight of us listed Facebook; Instagram and LinkedIn appeared on five lists. SnapChat, Canva, and EBay, one.

Next, I puzzled over what else we might ascertain about these environments and how they are capitalized. The table below shows an admittedly quick and crude search for each platform or site and its valuation. Up-to-date valuations weren’t always swift to turn up, and in some cases I opted to group a smaller entity, such as Dreamweaver, with the broader umbrella it sits beneath, such as Adobe.

Site/PlatformValuationParent CompanyNote(s)
Canva$40,000,000,000.00
CNN$10,000,000,000.00Warner Brothers Disney
Dreamweaver$231,000,000,000.00Adobe
EBay$22,880,000,000.00
Facebook$743,620,000,000.00Meta
GoodReads$150,000,000.00Amazon2013 valuation
GoogleDrive$863,200,000,000.00Google
Instagram$743,620,000,000.00Meta
JoySports$1,500,000.002018 valuation
LinkedIn$29,990,000,000.00Microsoft
MovableType
Myspace$12,000,000.002007 valuation
OperaNewsHub$636,500,000.00Opera2017 valuation
OrkutPurchased by Google, then shuttered
Reddit$16,600,000.00
Roll$12,000,000.00
SnapChat$1,070,000,000.00
TikTok$66,000,000,000.00
XTwitter$15,000,000,000.00
Whatsapp$96,800,000,000.002021 valuation
Wikipedia$6,600,000,000.00
Wikis
WordPress$7,500,000.00
YouTube$180,000,000.002022 valuation
Zoom$32,288,000,000.00
$2,903,084,100,000.00
Table 1. A quick and crude tabulation of the 25 sites/platforms we identified in association with the phrase “in digital environments” and the corresponding valuations.

I would do well to double-check this table, of course. Many zeroes! But for now I want to post it as an entry sent to the kicking-things-off winds. Phoo! And with this, wow, these digital environments are monied, closed, and proprietary, though they also at once bear out powerful mythologies of egalitarianism, social connectivity, access, and the democratization of knowledge.