alt Hacker NewsWhen we think about communities we need an effective model of what they are and how they operate.
What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.
That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".
Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.
Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?
Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.
Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.
The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]
Replies
Twitter is organized around tags, which are all right, I suppose. It's greatest weakness that it is rooted in short messages -- sound bites -- which are not conducive to reasoned debate. Though they removed that technical limitation, the culture was solidified at that point.
> What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
I'm taking this analogy for myself :)
> what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?
In my experience over the last year, these things are true...
First, in-person interaction is strictly better than digital. You can meet lots of people digitally and talk to them in bed, but _interacting_ with a given person face-to-face means you can do any digital interaction, plus have very high-bandwidth communication, and also share papers. (I love paper. It's not obsolete if you know what a Pareto frontier is.) This is something that many people understand intuitively but it took me a while to quantify it.
Second, digital (text) communication affords bickering. In the best case, if I'm DMing a friend and we disagree about some political point, it will make the conversation awkward. If I'm in a big group chat, it can drag people into a dogpile. It's an emotional drain and nobody really likes it. And it doesn't happen nearly as much in person. Even with the exact same people. Even I am nicer and more patient in person. And being able to physically leave and see someone later is a nice option that digital spaces (even Signal) don't afford. They only understand permanent blocks and not just "Tell me your dumb take another time."
Third, you can just say "I'm trying to build community and make friends, can I introduce you to some people you might like?" and in the right context and framing, it can sort of work. I am still learning this skill.
Fourth, and I almost forgot - A _huge_ amount of nonverbal communication comes down to trust and respect, especially respecting other people's time. Did you call a 50-person meeting where 1 person is yammering about some bikeshed bullshit? Everyone hates that. Are you talking to someone one-on-one but they still won't give you a turn or ask you anything about yourself? They might be a good person but they're gonna be hard to get along with if they keep that up. Did you send someone a blog post that takes 5 minutes to read? And they didn't ask for it? They aren't gonna read it. I wouldn't read it. You would have more luck reading it out loud to them in person because it shows that you are both respecting each other's time. Otherwise you are assigning homework and asking their attention without paying your attention to them. I can't name a person who likes that.
> Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things
Last time I looked, Sapir-Whorf is almost universally discredited among linguists and cognitive scientists.
The wikipedia summary:
"The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations throughout its history. The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by some earlier linguists pre-World War II since then it has fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists. Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them. "