I've been so incredibly busy with work lately so I've been cutting back on posting "Scouted" stories to the list. (In fact, from here on in, they'll probably just wind up on my blog instead.) But I thought this might be of as much interest to brinellers as it was to me. It's an essay by Clay Shirkey entitled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html) It's a rather fascinating analysis of the problems that can plague long-lasting and/or long term online groups. Discusses a variety of posting patterns and topics that elicit reactions, including broadcast vs., interactive online interactions, discussions about religion, the externalization of enemies to encourage group cohesion, censorship and free speech. The reason I flagged this for you, Dr. Brin is I'm curious about your opinion of the author's premise: that many of these patterns are inherent to human interaction and are therefore unavoidable. What do you think? Anyway, of particular interest to me was this section, which talks about a problem we've experienced here in the past relating to disruptions, censorship and free speech: "And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before. And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board. And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant." But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down. Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them. What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter. Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it. The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there." Jon We're not alone Maru http://zarq.livejournal.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
