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Perplexing issues in online community formation

After Bloggercon 3, I’ve become fascinated with issues of online community. I have to say that I remain deeply susupicious of the superstar “A-list” blogger culture. Sure, some of these people are consistently interesting; from a market perspective, many of them are market movers - a few are even market makers. But I cynically wonder all too often is this isn’t just a culture of fame, constructed within a sphere that techies are innately comfortable with and can own. Lookign at it critically, isn’t there something perverse about these reputation systems that rely on a community operating from individual isolation (as they type alone)?

But there is fame and group identity to be had. Bloggers have been having meet-ups and conferences galore, where they seek each other out for face to face interaction. Take Bloggercon 3, or even Gnomedex — I watched relationships form (and formed my own) with people who were able to ‘get to know’ each other via their blog posts. I spoke with other attendees, intimidated by the “A-list” bloggers, whom they pointed out like a movie star sighting; others made comments about the “A-list” bloggers being ‘much more accessible and nice than they expected to find them” — this given the status they are accorded. This was in the midst of Gnomedex where there already were “real” stars - actor Wil Wheaton (most famous from his stint on Star Trek Next Generation - now a blogger and involved in EFF), and Bloggercon 3 where MTV VJ and personality Adam Curry (involved in pushing podcasting forward)

I finally witnessed (what I hope will be) the apotheosis of this at Bloggercon - during the podcasting session. It was led by Adam Curry, and the first half of the hour involved telling the story of podcasting and calling out all the people involved - I’ve no issue there, credit is due. But with the mention of each notable the audience erupted into applause - person after person after person. I really should go back and listen to the Podcasting session again via IT Conversations to see how my memory fits reality and how many acknowledgements were made.

What I took away was a sense how much of an in-culture this is, and to wonder what that really means. I found many of my concerns echoed in a thought-provoking article by William Davies, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research in London, on the UK tech site, The Register. The article’s title is the politics of exclusion, and it was no doubt inspired by all the mentions of the word politics that the recent US presidential election spawned. However, once you get past the first section (which refers to a particular political situation in the UK that I personally don’t understand), the article becomes very relevant to the areas I’ve been examining. Some of it is impenetrable and perhaps even contradictory, but the areas I quote below represent some of the issues and concerns I’ve had about the greater meaning and impact of social software.

One result of this is that the politics of the net tends to involve shrinking it as a social sphere. This is what social software does, through creating new hierarchies, built on reputation and recommendation. …

The real politics of the net does not consist in creating new communities, with new forms of governance, moderation and values. It consists in mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, that tend to follow pre-existing sociological and economic divisions…

And once people are online, the net can be used to entrench other forms of exclusion and privilege – routers can be programmed with software that prioritise packets of information differently, based on real-time, corporate judgements of the real or potential profitability of the person sending the traffic.

But what’s perhaps most disappointing is how those with the most egalitarian hopes for the Internet can often end up constructing equally impenetrable hierarchies. The geek avant garde rarely discusses macro socio-technical issues, and tends to prefer micro-political systems, which calls self-organising and emergent. I was at ETCON in February, and as a slight outsider, I wondered how much that community realised how hierarchical and exclusive it appeared. It seemed that the technical mechanisms of reputation, such as blog-rolls and Technorati, had codified social inequalities in charisma and popularity (the politics of groups), until they had actually become institutionalised political forms.

So I wonder. In a world of blogrolling and link exchanging and namedropping where a meme gains life proportional to who mentions it, it makes me wonder how truly democratic it is. It seems to me that the barriers of entry - chief of which, from my view, is the sheer time involved in keeping up with these conversations - are tremendous and inherently skewed to a small portion of the population that look online for deep social interactions. But it does make sense - amid millions of bloggers, how can you hope to ferret out the good stuff individually? Why would you not “trust” the Teknorati 100 and the power of filtering to see the most mentioned? Implicit in that trust is trusting the top 100 - essentially outsourcing our search for the relevant and equating relevance with popularity.