The co-production and sharing of lay knowledge among Internet
users have grown. A large variety of communities of interest have
contributed to redefine knowledge as a social construction and to
redefine the mechanisms, elements and modes of knowledge
sharing. I will draw on two case studies that were carried out in Italy
in what has become commonly referred to as a shift from Web 1.0
to Web 2.0 inside the European funded project SIGIS Strategies of
Inclusion: Gender and the Information Society (SIGIS). This project
took place from 1 January 2001 to 31 January 2004. The first case
study deals with a website on the rare disease Lupus
erythematosus, and the second with the forums on the website of
the most read Italian women’s weekly, Donna Moderna. The
ethnographic analysis of the two websites included the application
of various methodological tools, among which were non-participant
observation, interviews, online surveys and the collection of the
messages exchanged in the two sites. Here I will focus on the
content analysis of the messages: 1,845 from the first website and
4,287 from the second. The main result is that a practical knowledge
deriving from an intertwined process of information, experience
and experimentation that supported the decision-making process
in users’ everyday life emerged. Consequently, the knowledge
produced in the vertical axis of specialists’ knowledge was
complemented by a knowledge produced in the horizontal axis of
the peer.
