Question 4 and Tech Musing 2: Stack Overflow

Here is my short response to question four. In this response, I discuss how the website Stack Overflow, and the community behind it acts as a source of collective action as well as a source of knowledge sharing.

It is a simple fact that coding can be extremely difficult and frustrating. Beginners and experts alike often encounter an issue that they just cannot seem to solve. One resource available to them is a website called Stack Overflow. http://stackoverflow.com/

Stack Overflow is a useful tool because it allows for beginner and expert coders to ask for and receive help from each other. Any user can post a piece of code that they are having issues with. By including the intent of the program, along with a list of things that they have tried to use to solve the issue, they can ask for assistance from others. Stack Overflow is more of a source of collective action than it is an information-sharing tool. The important part that makes the Stack Overflow community so helpful at solving these coding issues is that providing a solution of working code for the individual is not accepted. The community is dedicated to helping everyone learn to be a better coder. By providing solutions, nobody has learned from the interaction. This community has developed around the central idea of enhancing their ability to code. The goal is that anyone who visits the website can find or receive the assistance they need in order to complete their objective. This goal is what the collective action of the Stack Overflow community is trying to achieve.

Stack Overflow works much like a public forum such as reddit. Users can search for threads about the problem that they face, or might know how to solve. Users can also rate solutions if it worked to solve their issue. Furthermore, the original poster can select the solution that best helped them in order to make it easier for others with similar problems find the help that they may need. In coding, as there are many languages and many approaches to solving an issue, there is not one central problem that the Stack Overflow community is taking action to address. Instead, the type of problem that Stack Overflow tries to address is the problem that the solution to an issue encountered while coding is often difficult to find. Thusly, this website acts as a tool to cut the distance between code problem and code solution.