[iDC] The difference between community and voices

[Jean Burgess]

I should also note, the unevenness of participation you mention is a
consistent pattern across platforms, including mailing lists, blogs,
YouTube, Flickr, etc.; this is understood as a basic reality for the
developers of such platforms, and at least as far as I know it doesn't
appeared to have changed much, no matter what new thing comes along.

See Yahoo!'s Bradly Horowtiz on this issue a few years back, with handy
"pyramid of participation" graphic:
http://blog.elatable.com/2006/02/creators-synthesizers-and-consumers.html

"1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author
content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups
(lurkers)"

In my own work I have tried not to replicate the value judgements implicit
here: where "productivity" is valued over the practices of "mere" audiences.

That said, it is a constant challenge to facilitate active engagement
("voice", if you will) from a broader range of participants with interest in
whatever the focus of the online community happens to be.

Maybe Facebook is the exception to the rule?


Best
Jean


-- 
Dr. Jean Burgess
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (cci)
Queensland University of Technology

http://creativitymachine.net




> From: John Hopkins <jhopkins at tech-no-mad.net>
> Organization: neoscenes
> Reply-To: <jhopkins at tech-no-mad.net>
> Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:08:37 +1000
> To: <idc at mailman.thing.net>
> Subject: Re: [iDC] The difference between community and voices
> 
>> Social control is real, that's the problem. It is organized by elites
>> and imposed on the different classes, regional groups, ethnicities etc.
>> There are many forms of it. I am claiming that one of them, which has
> 
> Dearest List
> 
> I am coming to wonder about the presence of powerful authorial voices on
> mailing
> lists, and the radical departure from the traditional set of BIG voices
> pre-internet that The Network promised, a utopia of pluralism.  Has it come to
> pass?  I don't think so.
> 
> As I troll my personal archive of lists (nettime, spectre, 7-11, microsound,
> x-change, etc), I find that all of the lists that I have "participated" in
> have
> numerous subscribers (most list admins will not divulge the actual numbers,
> though I hereby invite Trebor to), along with a very short tail of posters,
> dominated by a very small clump of BIG voices.  Without hard numbers, but
> doing
> a sort on poster names in my 15-year Eudora archive on a number of lists the
> percentages run around 1-2% or less are BIG posters (80%+ of all content),
> with
> another 3-10% taking up the balance and a minor number of single posters.
> These
> numbers are calculated on the total number of all posts, and would therefore
> be
> MUCH more rarified if compared to all readers and subsequently, all
> subscribers.
> 
> What about all those other potential voices out there?
> 
> As I was reading yet another soaring post from Brian, I suddenly got the
> feeling
> I was reading a NYT best-selling novel, a page-turner, compelling, seamless,
> complete in both its content and its style (sometimes self-deprecating,
> sometimes bold, provocative, inviting the reader to question (rhetorically or
> in
> fact) the conclusions), a FORCE to silence competing views if only through the
> eminent readability, completeness, and intellectual coherence and
> seam-less-ness.  You can read nothing else except through the long text,
> consuming in the process, a largish piece of irretrievable life-time.  Time
> subtracted from embodied praxis.  The network labor of paying attention to BIG
> voices. When the reading is done, the time for action is also spent.
> Theory-as-text or text-as-theory soaking up valuable life-time for praxis,
> action.  And because the reading of this cannot simply stop in mid-word,
> mid-phrase, mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, mid-tome, mid-thread, mid-list
> subscription, more and more life gets absorbed in reading.  One long
> socially-constructed text which keeps action limited to eye-and-finger twitch
> for the duration.
> 
> And, by default, then, a dominant, BIG voice talking about action but
> obstructing the actuality.  Is a mailing list a community?
> If community is a situation dominated by a small number of BIG voices and
> minor 
> actions, I guess it is.  Is this a subtle form of social control?  what's the
> difference between that and subtle coercion?  (if I don't read, if I don't
> give 
> attention to the BIG voices, is there a bite-back from the social system? I
> think so.)
> 
> What does the health of "community" mean if community is literally not more
> than
> a handful of BIG voices within the collective? (community in quotes largely
> because of this historically repeated suspicion at the illusions of
> techno-democracy (or just distributed creativity) that was embedded at the
> outset of such online "communities")...
> 
> Wednesday morning non-threaded meditation commentary.
> 
> jh
> 
> 
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