Really, everything does relate back to my thesis...
As I guess most people have seen, LJ has finally commented about what has been going down (as it were) over the last few days (now with added updates responding to some of the points raised in comments).
There is just so much interesting stuff that has been happening as part of this to do with community interaction, standards, involvement and technology usage.
There are occasions when I watch LJ and what happens on it and am just stunned. Of course being an (proto-) academic that feeling often translates into 'thinking this would make a great paper'. The first time that happened was after the London Bombing - seeing the way people used LJ to check up on each other, to help keep each other abreast of the information and to offer support (often in our very British, taking-the-piss way). I think that was the first time I had seen the social network that underlies LJ become really clear. Most of the time I don't think of LJ as a social networking site because it is so much more. I argued in my thesis that the concept of 'community' went beyond that of 'social network' because it required shared purposes and behaviours which a social network (a collection of people) does not. Within LJ, it is those shared purposes and behaviors (within communities, not across all of LJ) which, to my mind, predominate.
I think the last few days have been the second thing on LJ which has shown clearly the way that the underlying social network and the overlying social community of technology such as LJ can come together. Or as one commentator put it " Never fuck with something as batshit crazy as fandom" - except it isn't just about fandom. There are two parts to why I think that, first that there were two overlapping groups that could be seen reacting to events fandom and freedom of speach advocates. This is pretty much summed up by the two themes I have repeatedly seen variations of: 'go after potential molesters but don't clump us with them' and 'people should be able to speak/write honestly as long as they don't do anything but speak/write'. Second, that I would argue it was about fandom as a community reacting, that is the reaction was about the community not something unique to fandom. A number of people have compared the reaction of the community to the response to Digg trying to prevent users posting information about a software key. Again, we have what many people see as a freedom of speach issue or a community shared practice issue and a community responding on-mass to the hosting sites actions. The point that both sites are companies and have the right to set what happens within their domain can and was made in both case along with the corollary that people were free to go to another site. However what can be seen in both cases is the community saying that the site is suposedly a community site and we are a large part of that community - do you really want to loose the community and keep the site? Yes, a lot of this can probably be put down to the type of entitlement which keeps FW supplied but does that make the reaction worthless? And that isn't even touching on the legal aspects which are outside my scope (RL law obviously community behavour guidelines but that is where the discussion starts, not where it ends). But when you have enough people taking part and the argument is not 'why are you doing this to me' but 'why are you doing this to us' then you have to start thinking about what the social implications actually are.
In my thesis one of the quotes that got singled out was "This thesis is about people". It is about the way people use technology, not as an individual but as a group. It is about the way LJ is percieved as a site and the way the technology within it is used.
LJ is percieved as a place in which fandom can play. Not all of fandom is on LJ, not all of LJ is fandom but their is a significant amount of fandom community action taking place on LJ, especially in the younger fandoms. If that perception of LJ as a place of fan community hadn't been the case would people have reacted as strongly as they did? I do not believe so. Some people will undoubtably leave for JournalFen or GreatestJournal but many don't want to because of the years they have on the site and because the communities that they are a part of, and have spent years as part of, are here. The CNet article was a mistake for a few reasons but I think the "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not" quote is one that has they probably regret. Building communities is very hard to do, directing communities, especially when you are not part of them, is really, really hard to do. Look at the discussions that happen within fandom on where and whether a line should be drawn on content or the protection of underage readers/writers and about the only concensus you will see is that noone wants someone from outside the community telling them how the community should work.
This is where the interaction between technology and society becomes fun - communities will form around a technology if they can use it to interact in a way that is useful to them. In some cases new communities will form - this is what the Web 2.0 guys are always going on about, through finding other people with similar interests and world views you can interact and you have a proto-commmunity. In other cases you will attract communities that already exist and they will adapt the technology to their needs.
Like interests.
The edit profile page does say:
"
Short single-word phrases are best.
Rule of thumb: You should be able to put the interest in the sentence "I like ________"."
Now like a lot of people I read that as 'here is an example sentence to explain what we mean by short single-word phrases' for those people who don't get that this is basically tagging. It is a list of 'here are things that might come up'. I have occasionally used them to find other people (or more accurately communities) who also have that phrase but as a way of searching for something they are not exactly efficient. Tagging is for browse and meander searching rather than I am looking for something specific searching - I can quote the papers if necessary - the rest of the time it is for labelling.
Apparently we were supposed to understand the information differently.
"
Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of “I like x”, “I’m in favor of x” or “I support x”. As many profiles are the only public part of a private journal and profiles serve partly as an advertisement for people of like interests, it is important that the content of a profile can be evaluated as if it stands alone." ( Barak Berkowitz, 'Well we really screwed this one up…')
There is a bit of a catch-22 situation going on here. Journals with material that they think are adult or contravercial are more likely to lock their posts. Indeed in their FAQ on adult-oriented communities they specifically say moderate the membership and member-lock anything dodgy. Now there is a difference between adult-oriented and contravercial but given the general practice of friend or member locking contravercial posts as well as 'adult' ones, a community that needs to provide context to their profile is the type of community which will be locked down and can't. Which means everyone is going to go away and have a nice long think about how they interact with there own and others interests.
Here is a clash of cultures between 'but it is a keyword it implies nothing more than the concept might be included' and 'if it interests you that implies it interests you'. This can be overcome by a change or compramise of practice. Maybe everyone just goes and edits their interests to 'like X', 'don't like X' and 'theme: X' or some equivilent. If communties as a collective decide to tag like that it might work. Of course given all the disagreements over people saying they don't like a particular ship or person/character I can see one or two potential bumps in the road.
This came up for me when I was looking at how to describe content. In creating an ontology to describe narrative (which is complex enough) we made the decision not to deal with interpretation. The closest we got was allowing the markup to include information on whether an event was explicitally stated in the narrative, some form or subtext or interpretation or whether the information had been garnered from an outside source. This is not interpretation about an event - just about whether or not it happened. The problem with that is that there is no way in our ontology to differentiate between Romeo and Juliet (Juliet nearly 14) or The Satyricon (one of the characters in an 'on-page' sex scene is under 8) both of which are available from Penguin Classics and something that society has decided is bad. This is not a technical problem but a social one which is why we didn't try to solve it but raised it as an interesting point since any technology that uses it, or something similar, is going to have to take it into account when it reaches the user. Because otherwise you are going to have one group of people thinking a bit of metadata implies one thing and another group thinking it means something else.
In some ways this is a good thing. Too many LJ (and other site users) seem to believe that LJ exists in this magic bubble which doesn't connect to the outside world. Technology is very good at connecting things - it is what the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 are all about. This is why the social side is so important, how these things are going to work is going to be a negotiation between imposed law and community standards. Getting that into people's consciousness may help with problems in the future because this is an issue that is not going to go away and which cannot be solved purely by technology or by laws (destruction not being a useful solution) but by a combination of tech, law and community.
When I was thinking about the extension to the social networking system that I proposed one of the things that I concidered was allowing people a method of keeping things within the community context in which they existed. There was concern when I did my survey about people not in fandom and who didn't understand it getting worked up about some of the aspects. It also fed into a way to allow adults to keep work within a adult community if they so desired. The important thing that I gathered was personal choice - some uses wanted to publicise themselves, others wanted to battern down the hatches. It still makes me wonder if the system could be tweaked enough to help shield socially networked communties such as fandom from the nutbar fringe while at the same time not providing a safe haven for people who want to cause harm to others.
I'm going to stop waffling now. I hope that made something resembling sense.
There is just so much interesting stuff that has been happening as part of this to do with community interaction, standards, involvement and technology usage.
There are occasions when I watch LJ and what happens on it and am just stunned. Of course being an (proto-) academic that feeling often translates into 'thinking this would make a great paper'. The first time that happened was after the London Bombing - seeing the way people used LJ to check up on each other, to help keep each other abreast of the information and to offer support (often in our very British, taking-the-piss way). I think that was the first time I had seen the social network that underlies LJ become really clear. Most of the time I don't think of LJ as a social networking site because it is so much more. I argued in my thesis that the concept of 'community' went beyond that of 'social network' because it required shared purposes and behaviours which a social network (a collection of people) does not. Within LJ, it is those shared purposes and behaviors (within communities, not across all of LJ) which, to my mind, predominate.
I think the last few days have been the second thing on LJ which has shown clearly the way that the underlying social network and the overlying social community of technology such as LJ can come together. Or as one commentator put it " Never fuck with something as batshit crazy as fandom" - except it isn't just about fandom. There are two parts to why I think that, first that there were two overlapping groups that could be seen reacting to events fandom and freedom of speach advocates. This is pretty much summed up by the two themes I have repeatedly seen variations of: 'go after potential molesters but don't clump us with them' and 'people should be able to speak/write honestly as long as they don't do anything but speak/write'. Second, that I would argue it was about fandom as a community reacting, that is the reaction was about the community not something unique to fandom. A number of people have compared the reaction of the community to the response to Digg trying to prevent users posting information about a software key. Again, we have what many people see as a freedom of speach issue or a community shared practice issue and a community responding on-mass to the hosting sites actions. The point that both sites are companies and have the right to set what happens within their domain can and was made in both case along with the corollary that people were free to go to another site. However what can be seen in both cases is the community saying that the site is suposedly a community site and we are a large part of that community - do you really want to loose the community and keep the site? Yes, a lot of this can probably be put down to the type of entitlement which keeps FW supplied but does that make the reaction worthless? And that isn't even touching on the legal aspects which are outside my scope (RL law obviously community behavour guidelines but that is where the discussion starts, not where it ends). But when you have enough people taking part and the argument is not 'why are you doing this to me' but 'why are you doing this to us' then you have to start thinking about what the social implications actually are.
In my thesis one of the quotes that got singled out was "This thesis is about people". It is about the way people use technology, not as an individual but as a group. It is about the way LJ is percieved as a site and the way the technology within it is used.
LJ is percieved as a place in which fandom can play. Not all of fandom is on LJ, not all of LJ is fandom but their is a significant amount of fandom community action taking place on LJ, especially in the younger fandoms. If that perception of LJ as a place of fan community hadn't been the case would people have reacted as strongly as they did? I do not believe so. Some people will undoubtably leave for JournalFen or GreatestJournal but many don't want to because of the years they have on the site and because the communities that they are a part of, and have spent years as part of, are here. The CNet article was a mistake for a few reasons but I think the "It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not" quote is one that has they probably regret. Building communities is very hard to do, directing communities, especially when you are not part of them, is really, really hard to do. Look at the discussions that happen within fandom on where and whether a line should be drawn on content or the protection of underage readers/writers and about the only concensus you will see is that noone wants someone from outside the community telling them how the community should work.
This is where the interaction between technology and society becomes fun - communities will form around a technology if they can use it to interact in a way that is useful to them. In some cases new communities will form - this is what the Web 2.0 guys are always going on about, through finding other people with similar interests and world views you can interact and you have a proto-commmunity. In other cases you will attract communities that already exist and they will adapt the technology to their needs.
Like interests.
The edit profile page does say:
"
Short single-word phrases are best.
Rule of thumb: You should be able to put the interest in the sentence "I like ________"."
Now like a lot of people I read that as 'here is an example sentence to explain what we mean by short single-word phrases' for those people who don't get that this is basically tagging. It is a list of 'here are things that might come up'. I have occasionally used them to find other people (or more accurately communities) who also have that phrase but as a way of searching for something they are not exactly efficient. Tagging is for browse and meander searching rather than I am looking for something specific searching - I can quote the papers if necessary - the rest of the time it is for labelling.
Apparently we were supposed to understand the information differently.
"
Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of “I like x”, “I’m in favor of x” or “I support x”. As many profiles are the only public part of a private journal and profiles serve partly as an advertisement for people of like interests, it is important that the content of a profile can be evaluated as if it stands alone." ( Barak Berkowitz, 'Well we really screwed this one up…')
There is a bit of a catch-22 situation going on here. Journals with material that they think are adult or contravercial are more likely to lock their posts. Indeed in their FAQ on adult-oriented communities they specifically say moderate the membership and member-lock anything dodgy. Now there is a difference between adult-oriented and contravercial but given the general practice of friend or member locking contravercial posts as well as 'adult' ones, a community that needs to provide context to their profile is the type of community which will be locked down and can't. Which means everyone is going to go away and have a nice long think about how they interact with there own and others interests.
Here is a clash of cultures between 'but it is a keyword it implies nothing more than the concept might be included' and 'if it interests you that implies it interests you'. This can be overcome by a change or compramise of practice. Maybe everyone just goes and edits their interests to 'like X', 'don't like X' and 'theme: X' or some equivilent. If communties as a collective decide to tag like that it might work. Of course given all the disagreements over people saying they don't like a particular ship or person/character I can see one or two potential bumps in the road.
This came up for me when I was looking at how to describe content. In creating an ontology to describe narrative (which is complex enough) we made the decision not to deal with interpretation. The closest we got was allowing the markup to include information on whether an event was explicitally stated in the narrative, some form or subtext or interpretation or whether the information had been garnered from an outside source. This is not interpretation about an event - just about whether or not it happened. The problem with that is that there is no way in our ontology to differentiate between Romeo and Juliet (Juliet nearly 14) or The Satyricon (one of the characters in an 'on-page' sex scene is under 8) both of which are available from Penguin Classics and something that society has decided is bad. This is not a technical problem but a social one which is why we didn't try to solve it but raised it as an interesting point since any technology that uses it, or something similar, is going to have to take it into account when it reaches the user. Because otherwise you are going to have one group of people thinking a bit of metadata implies one thing and another group thinking it means something else.
In some ways this is a good thing. Too many LJ (and other site users) seem to believe that LJ exists in this magic bubble which doesn't connect to the outside world. Technology is very good at connecting things - it is what the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 are all about. This is why the social side is so important, how these things are going to work is going to be a negotiation between imposed law and community standards. Getting that into people's consciousness may help with problems in the future because this is an issue that is not going to go away and which cannot be solved purely by technology or by laws (destruction not being a useful solution) but by a combination of tech, law and community.
When I was thinking about the extension to the social networking system that I proposed one of the things that I concidered was allowing people a method of keeping things within the community context in which they existed. There was concern when I did my survey about people not in fandom and who didn't understand it getting worked up about some of the aspects. It also fed into a way to allow adults to keep work within a adult community if they so desired. The important thing that I gathered was personal choice - some uses wanted to publicise themselves, others wanted to battern down the hatches. It still makes me wonder if the system could be tweaked enough to help shield socially networked communties such as fandom from the nutbar fringe while at the same time not providing a safe haven for people who want to cause harm to others.
I'm going to stop waffling now. I hope that made something resembling sense.