Other words

[pecunium]

One of the things I wish Lj did better is building community. It's not that I dilike what Lj is, the ability to have, essentially, a news feed of people I like to read, and not have to open dozens of windows, hack my own code, etc. is wonderful.

It's very good at fostering relationships, but they tend to be either didactic, or a set of overlapping groups. There are some 400 people who read this. There are, at any given time, about a dozen who comment. No, there are more than that, but it's rare for more than a dozen to chime in on something, and the conversations are (as a rule) short exchanges, without a whole lot of side-chatter elaboration.

On Lj, one; generally, speaks to the author, and that's about it.

There is something to be said for that (and I think the threading functions are a part of that).

There are other blogs I like, which have a different dynamic, one which has some sense of inclusion: Orcinus, Pandagon, Slackitivist.

Boing-Boing is starting to build that. There's been a lot of tension about it; because part of the reason is the tragedy of the commons. Usenet has become a swamp. A vast bastion of Libertarianism. A place where a lot of people are offended that they can't do anything they want.

Boing-Boing suffered from that. They used to have comments, but the trolls came, and stank up the joint. So they hired tnh to practice her moderation-fu. I've been watching her style for a long time, because her blog, Making Light, has a wonderful community. It has community because it has rules (I have rules, because I watched Usenet go from fun, to toxic sludge, and I watched some of the folks I liked to spend time with move to Making Light, and keep the parts I liked, and I took the ideas I saw implemented there, and tailored them to my sense of order).

The proof of the pudding is how the hot-button topics get handled. Anyplace can be swell to hang out when no one is stepping on your corns. It's when oxen are being gored the community comes into play.

Making Light is the best, online example I can find (I think the folks here have done all right, but there have only been a few tests of the concept). Is it perfect? No. As with any other such place, being new can be hard (esp. if one is used to other fora; or comes in with a far outlying minority position). It keeps to its nature, even though the people change (in the course of the six, maybe seven years I've been something of a regular, a lot of active members have come and gone).

But (and this is the meat of the matter), there have been some real furballs, the sort which I've seen destroy other places, maintain a fair amount of civlility. They can be prickly, brash, blunt, even rude. As a rule, they aren't offensive.

The best example I can give is one on Ron Paul, which ended up drifting to abortion: how it went.

What I saw (and for reasons hard to explain, I went and re-read it all again today, because I was thinking about community, and how it works) was everyone (even when pisssed off) who was taking part being (as a rule) civil. I saw people reminding them that civil matters. The members take it upon themselves to keep the place the sort of place they want it to be.

It spills over, I've seen the ML regulars in other venue (some are known to comment here). They can be prickly, brash, even rude. As a rule they aren't offensive.

It's not a bad way to be seen.

Comments

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

The communities here, though, can really be bonding. I've made a lot of connections, and enjoy the company of, people from communities here.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

They can. There are people here I would be far poorer for not having met. This place has been support, and comfort.

But (and perhaps I failed in explaining it) the sort of communities I've found here tend to be smaller, and not posssesed of that sort of group identity.

TK

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

I guess...the ones here are large enough, more and I get overwhelmed (like I do, sometimes, on Somethingawful, the only other big place I hang out).

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I don't know. Of the blogs you mention, I read Making Light and Pandagon; I participate more at Making Light and feel more identified with the community there than I do with Pandagon (although it gives me great delight to recognize MLers over there!), but I really think of LJ as my home.

I came into it when it was still invite-codes, with the intent of ordinary daily-life blogging and staying in touch with my friends; I got caught up in Potter fandom, and made some amazing friends that way; I maintained contact with Amber-fandom friends even after I'd dropped off the Amber Mailing List (and that played a role in intensifying the friendship with the person who's currently my housemate and best friend); and sometimes through THOSE connections, I met people I'd never have encountered otherwise, who've become closer and dearer to me than many I've met through accidents of geographic proximity.

For instance, matociquala fits both into the category of Amber mailing list friend, and RL friend (I knew her years before she was published, when we were in the SCA together), but she has a far wider readership than I command, due to her status as published author who blogs about her craft, and when she blogged about a Goth bowling expedition I dragged her on to welcome her back to the area, I wound up in a conversation in comments with another of her readers, who turns out to think about life in much the same way I do, and who's now one of my trusted friends.

Same for another person I originally met because someone linked to an interesting essay she wrote about... I think it was gender performance and Potter characters.

I guess I see LJ as having the same community potential as Making Light, just in a more diffuse fashion. The conversation doesn't take place only in one journal's comments, even if one post spawns loads of them (like misia's "No Pity, No Shame, No Silence" post) -- it gets picked up and carried across other journals, people link, the discussion grows, and connections are made.

I know that if it went away, there'd be a huge hole in my life.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Of the blogs mentioned, I'd say Slacktivist is the most ML one.

Maybe it's because I came to Lj, after I'd been in Usenet, BBSs, and ML. I like Lj, and even in my semi-gaffiation of the moment, a lack of it (a place I am in the catbird seat of what goes up) would be painful.

I was afraid I was going to screw this up. I don't think Lj has no community aspect, but it is, as you say, more diffuse. This is a good thing. The amplification aspect is good.

We benefit from being able to be independent. It helps. The things I've said here on torture; if nothing else get more readership for me saying it in my own right, rather than as comment in other venues.

Perhaps it's more of hanging out at school at Lj, and a part at ML.

I see why evilrooster works so hard at studying community. It's no one thing (and I did a poor job of making my awareness of that clear).

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I'm a veteran of Usenet and BBSes as well -- oddly, BBSes AFTER Usenet, because I got thrown in at the deep end when I arrived at MIT in 1987, and only resorted to BBSes when Fidonet was the only cost-effective way I had to connect in the early 90s. For me, LJ feels more personal and controllable than Usenet, but broader than a single weblog (no matter how popular or how active the comments section).

And, of course, it all cross-pollinates. I added you here because of consistently appreciating your comments at ML. (I ought to ad evilrooster too!)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's the difference (to reach for metaphor), depth vs. breadth.

ML, et al (slacktivist, Orcinus, etc.) tend to depth.

There are some which seem to be in the Middle, Lawyers, Guns, and Money, Glenn Greenwald, and some which don't ever seem to gel (Firedoglake, Atrios, Hullabaloo).

I wonder if it's a function of readership. If too many, or not enough, people comment no one feels a part of something.

It does cross pollinate. There are a number of people I readn here because I know them from elsewhere. It's a good thing.

I think it's some sweet point combining breadth and depth

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Too many people talking about too many subjects too publicly are intimidating - or draw out mostly extremes.

Too few people (LJ-type places) don't really challenge a reader/writer enough, and they have the tendency of being more of a podium-audience relationship than a colloquium, as Usenet (at its best) and mailing lists tend to be.

Making Light's genius (that would be TNH, I think) is in the elevation of the audience onto that podium, rather than having the audience drag the conversation down to the lowest common conversational denominator.

Somewhat tangentially, I've been reading a (fabulous, fascinating, jump-up-and-down interesting) book about Sumeria and its life and culture. Among other cultural artifacts it describes a dispute between two scholars, recoded in cuneiform on clay tablets. For all the world it sounds like a flame war. It is not described as such because the book predates e-mail by half a decade or so, though. Let me know if you want me to type up some of the choicest bits - it's full of ad hominem argumentation, straw men and just plain invective. It's from approximately 2500 B.C.

I vacillate between being utterly horrified by that and reacting like Valentine Michael Smith did to the violence he witnessed among monkeys (reference - for any of your readership that hasn't read it - to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.)

[shunra.livejournal.com]

You mention difficulties "if one [...] comes in with a far outlying minority position".

You have pinpointed an issue not just with online fora. Observe the general discourse in the United States (political, ethical, emotional - you pick it, any field). So narrow a band of opinion is accepted that even having an opinion becomes suspect.

One way of looking at it is that in the U.S. it is less pronunciation and more opinionation that has a single acceptable register, where everything else is consigned to the trash heap.

I'm not sure how the electorate a republic can continue to function cohesively with such a monoculture of opinions. Perhaps it no longer does.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine, novalis has the idea of a bit torrent type distributed network that would replace LJ, and not rely on potentially disruptive companies.

Mght work as a good way to have LJ type communities.

Re: I think it's some sweet point combining breadth and depth

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Ooooh!

yes, please

That sounds a lot like reading Talmud. I wonder if there's any relation.

Listserve has it's joys. There were a few I was really active in (and there are some who comment to me here from one of them), but it can be hard to keep up, and the effort is great. Lots of asychrony in strange ways.

TK

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I have to question whether communities _can_ be "built". Or should be. (I don't much like cheerleaders, or manipulators, on general principles.) It seems to me that communities mostly just grow, with the realization that they are communities coming after the fact. And "LJ" is vastly too enormous to be a community _per se_ , as is (perhaps) any open-membership system on the net nowadays. Too many people, with too little in common, and too little Need to be in that particular place. (I've seen that happen in Science Fiction Fandom over the past half-century -- people now sometimes _talk_ about it being a Community (or even Family) but I think it was much more of one back when there were only five or six hundred people active in it, and they all read pretty much the same books.)

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Democracy depends on some level of monoculture. The minority opinions have to believe they are still incorporated in the grand scheme of things.

If the polity stops feeling that, civil war ensues.

I've seen some studies which posit the largest electorate which can be sustained by a direct democracy is about 5,000. That's, oddly enough about the size of Athen's electorate during the Peleponesean Wars. A similar size seems to have been the case for the other large cities in Greece.

I think the largest flaw I see in those studies is they seem to take Greece as the archtype, and so other polity (such as Switzerland) which seem to manage with a much larger elecotorate (and I don't know enough about the Dutch Polder evilrooster was mentioning to know how large the functional unit of the directly democratic aspects are) and have done so for far longer than the heyday of the Greek city states.

But with a great deal more homogeneity Switzdeutch/Romansch/French and Catholic/Protestant distinctions notwithstanding.

TK

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I think built isn't the best of terms. Grown? Fostered? Inculcated?

I do think they can be made to happen; what one gets will not always be what one expects, but like pruning a tree, the shape can be guided.

TK

Quote from an AWESOME book

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Samuel Noah Kramer's book The Sumerians, Their History, Culture, and Character (published in 1963) has been one of those "I wish I could read in my sleep" books.

I've quoted a bit in my LJ (it was friendslocked, but I've released it for public reading. I'm happy to add people to the friends' list - the point of the restriction is to avoid trolling and driveby rages.) Here's a description of a composition which Kramer describes (p. 222) as a "disputation":

[quoting from Kramer:]

The "Disputation between Enkitalu and Enkihegal", which consists of about two hundred and fifty lines, begins with the rather surprising statement, "Fellows. today we don't work," and continues with a series of about twenty paragraphs, most of which are from four to five lines in length, replete with insults and taunts hurled by the two protagonists against each other. Here, for example, we find one saying to the other caustically:

Where is he, where is he (this fellow), who compares his pedigree to my pedigree! Neither on the female side nor on the male side can he compare his pedigree to my pedigree. Neither on the master's side nor on the slave's side is your pedigree like mine.

To which the other retorts:

Wait now, don't brag so, you have no future.

Which only adds fuel to the fie:

What do you mean I have no future! My future is every bit as good as your future. Both from the point of view of wealth, as well as of pedigree, my future is as good as your future.

Or take this acrimonious paragraph in which the one taunts the other as a most unmusical fellow:

You have a harp but know no music,
You who are the "water boy" of (your) colleagues,
(Your) throat (?) can't sound a note,
Your stutter (your) Sumerian, can't make a straight speech,
Can't sing a hymn, can't open (your mouth,
And you are an accomplished fellow!


Finally, after one of the antagonists had cast aspersions on the members of the family of his opponent, they decided to go to their "city" and have their colleagues decide between them. But, if I understand correctly the rather obscure and ambiguous text at this point, they were advised to go to the ugula, "the supervisor (?)" in the edubba [school], and he, the ugula, decided that both were at fault and scolded them for wasting their time in quarrels and disputes.
[end of quote]

I would hardly be suprised if the ugula had them disemvoweled.

And from page 241

[shunra.livejournal.com]

[Kramer gives a folk etymology for sophpmore as being a fusion of sophos-moros - clever and fool - and the Sumerian equivalent, galam-huru and continues :]

The composition consists primarily of a bitter verbal contest between two schoolmates named Enkimansi and Girnishag, both of whom are far advanced in their studies; in fact, Girnishag may have reached the height of being "big brotehr", that is, an assistant instructor in the school. In the course of the disputation each talks up his own virtues and talents in glowing terms and talks down his opponent with withering sneers and vituperative insults. Thus near the very beginning of the document, one of these worthies addresses the other as follows:
You dolt, numskull, school pest, you illiterate, you Sumerian ignoramus, your hand is terrible; it cannot even hold the stylus properly; it is unfit for writing and cannot take dictation. (And yet you say) you are a scribe like me.

To this the other worthy answers:

What do you mean I am not a scribe like you? When you write a document it makes no sense. When you write a lietter it is illegible (?). You go to divide up an estate, but are unable to divide up the estate. For when you go to survey the field, you can't hold the measuring line. You can't hold a nail in your hand; you have no sense. You don't know how to arbitrate between the contesting parties; you aggravate the struggle between the brothers. You are one of the most incopmetent of tablet writers. What are you fit for, can any one say(?)?

[Kramer brings about 500 more words of this delightful exchange. I like to think of him laughing aloud when he translated it. Blessed be his memory, and may his heaven be that of the scribes. Here's something about him (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Noah_Kramer). I'm going to go buy up everything he wrote right about now.]

[shunra.livejournal.com]

Do communities crystallize out of supersaturated solutions?

And the third issue...

[shunra.livejournal.com]

I am terribly conflicted about calling anything "like reading Talmud" - which I have, albeit with only my own mind to support me; women in the society I grew up in are heavily discouraged from study of that particular body of law.

If one sees the Talmud anthropologically then yes, it may be a lot like reading the Talmud. But I can't do that. I am still shadow-boxing against the people I grew up among, the ones who tried to live up (?) to the very tiniest letter of its very most extreme law. I imagine that seeing it from the outside would be a fascinating experience - but I had to claw my way out, and I lost my entire family and frame of reference thereby. So for me the Talmud is a horror story - while Sumerian law and history is fascinating, because no one is trying to live up to it (or to force me to live up to it).

I hope this makes sense...

[thirstygirl.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I've been musing about this a little during an internal debate over whether I was going to move from Lj or not in the most recent kerfuffle.

My flist is pre-dominantly people that I know in real life and so there is a place for the combination of reviews, social updates, and random rants on economics/feminism/politics that makes up the majority of my posts. We get some pretty good fights going on in some of the rants given the range of views in my social group but it stays civil because, well, we're friends. [I ended up sticking with Lj because if I had an Actual Blog I felt my posts would need to be Actual Posts and not this combination of fluff and content.]

However I am also a member of several communities on LJ which seem to have managed to get a group energy going. You see the same people commenting on different comms and you know them- again the mods and the main commenters have managed to get a civil tone predominating. When there is unjustified snark you will get other users, not just mods, pulling people into line. I think it's partly talking to the same people in different comms that gets users invested in maintaining the tone of the comm- you want it to be a nice place so you can talk to your friends there.

[I came across you via Slacktivist and Pandagon, even if I seldom comment here]

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Fostered, yes, or encouraged, and nudged to affect direction (but physical vectors aren't accurate predictors of where it will go). I'd suggest that the largest & strongest on-line Community might be AOL -- which features most of what I happen to consider the worst aspects of artificially-constructed (pseudo-) Community.

How narrow a monoculture?

[shunra.livejournal.com]

If I am all apples, and he all pine, would we really need a fence?

My darling husband is half Dutch, half Swiss; I grew up within an undemocratic but decidedly opinion-encompassing culture in Israel. What I'm seeing/feeling here is a marginalization that excludes all but a very narrow band of opinions - sort of a Rovian "permanent Republican majority": if you're not within the band, you're an outcast. Salon's Glenn Greenwald refers to the sought quality as "Seriousness".

I wonder whether the narrowness of the acceptable band is inverse to the size of the band of men composing the electorate.

Re: And the third issue...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I come to Talmud from a third perspective; one which is semi-religious and not at all Jewish. I was, at one time, considering becoming a Jesuit (Fr. Karney, SJ, has a ring to it).

It's a way of life which is introspective, extrospective, theological (they are the Pope's advisors on theology) and incredibly wide-ranging in study.

I am a disputative person (I know my admission of this is probably a shock), and the core, in a lot of ways, of the Christian tradition comes of Talmud.

So I read it (present tense).

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The moderators take an active role, yes? There is a set of expectations? Or is it rather a set of rules?

I ask because evilrooster has gotten me to thinking of how community comes to be, and then how it works; sustains itself, or dies.

I have fluff and content. I don't know that I'd have it be any different if I had a freestanding blog (I won't say real, because this is real, and I have a larger readership than I think I could maintain elstwise. I also probably have fewer trolls).

I blog for me. That it pleases others is a wonderful thing (and I might not keep it up, had I no feedback), but if I did it for them it would become a flat, and lifeless, enterprise.

I am pleased to discover that my, intermittent, presence at Slacktivist (and even more intermittent at Panddagon) was interesting enough to lead you here.

Thank you.

(and I look in on your journal. I've been less than active on Lj of late, so I can't say if I have it on my regular reading; I need to recheck that list anyway)

TK

Re: How narrow a monoculture?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The problem isn't if I'm all apples and he all pine, but I'm all apples and he all ciderpress.

What you are desccibing is precisely that problem. The Rovian method (which goes to Falwellian types) is the poisonous idea that a group is going to be ground underheel.

Those people no longer share the belief they can be in the minority, and still be partners in the process. They are being oppressed; and they are told it's by a minority.

That minority,they are told, want's to rob them, despoil them, destroy them.

So, they decide, "those people" don't deserve to be treated fairly. That's a pernicious idea.

How do we combat it? I don't know. Speak out. Try to show that inclusion works. Somehow make it plain that it isn't a zero-sum game.

TK

[thirstygirl.livejournal.com]

Hmm, seems to be mostly expectations. Most 'pull your socks up' comes from other members but mods step in occasionally. Very occasionally actually as there seems to be a common agreement to be civil.

I suspect for some of the communities it's because, as I said, you end up talking with the same people over and over again so that as a commentator you start to feel some stake in keeping the place nice- it's not just up to the official owners of/posters to the comms.