“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Godwin’s Law
The image above illustrates, to me, the level of frenzy community members get into as they become more and more emotionally involved in a community. I’m not entirely sure what the member is protesting here as there didn’t seem to be any clear direction to a specific instance, but from what I’ve heard through the grapevine, it has something to do with nudity on Flickr. I’ve always thought it was ridiculous to censor artistic nudity, but some of what I’ve been witness to on Flickr crosses the line between art and porn. Still, it doesn’t bother me personally. I’m pretty much neutral on the porn thing (although I find most of it extremely boring and non-titillating…probably because it’s not made for me). I also don’t tend to censor what my son consumes (and if he were a daughter, I wouldn’t either), I just hope my lessons of respect for women over-ride any of the objectified ones.
But this isn’t the point, really.
The point is hot buttons. And you know that you have an emotionally invested community when someone can yell “Fire!” (or, in this case Nazis, Censorship and Control) and cause a real ruckus.
I’ve cited McMillan & Chavis’ work on Sense of Community in many of my presentations, but I don’t think I’ve ever pointed to it here. There are, basically, four ’senses’, each one forming a deeper bond that occur:
- Sense of Membership
- Feelings of Influence
- Integration and Fulfillment of Needs
- Shared Emotional Connection
I describe this journey into a deeper and deeper sense of community in the way you may recall entering any social group. In the beginning, you recognize commonalities (dress, language, symbols, etc.) that make you feel like you’ve ‘come home’…that this group can understand who you are: sense of membership. There is also a basic feeling of safety, but you don’t give yourself completely yet. You are hanging around, picking up on the gestures, the signs. That’s the level of Influence that is taking place. This is when you start communicating. You make a statement and see how it is responded to. You feel listened to. You are also learning from the group. You are starting to ‘fit in’. As you fit in more and more, the rewards are piling up. You feel status over time, you are working together towards accomplishing something. More and more trust happens. You are integrated and your needs (as well as the groups) are being fulfilled. You feel secure and safe and can rely on one another and you are more than happy to do your part.
Shared emotional connection is tough. It takes time and/or crisis to really gel. M&C list the following as ways that a community forms the emotional connection:
- Contact. The more face to face stuff, the deeper the connection.
- Quality of interaction. Hard to judge, but think of team-building exercises where you are actually having to work together toward a true end. Where you have to really trust one another.
- Closure to events. Ambiguous interactions don’t tend to drive groups together as much as definitive events.
- Shared events. Crisis. Life and death. Banding together.
- Investment of time and energy. Um…it just takes time and dedication…
- Honor and humiliation. Those in the community honored will feel closer, humiliated with retaliate, bringing others together.
- Spiritual bond. Hard to define
This is the point at which ‘hot buttons’ have a real impact. They trigger both the ‘Honor and humiliation’ as well as the ‘Shared events’ (crisis) points and they both drive a wedge between community members as well as bring them closer together.
Why Nazis, Censorship and Control tend to come up so frequently is that they are the kind of ‘agreed upon’ enemies that almost everyone can get behind to fight. All three causes a strong, visceral reaction that flies in the face of what we discuss as holding dear.
But what is actually happening in these communities is usually a far cry from Nazi politics, censorship and controlling behavior. It’s usually misunderstandings and reactions, defensiveness and over-reactions that are hyperbolized far beyond what is really happening between multiple well-meaning, but obviously frustrated parties. Human beings have fragile egos and everyone has a stake in making things the way they are.
In fact, even if you don’t think you have a stake, you do. Years ago, I read an amazing book called The Dance of Anger, which is targeted at women’s relationships, but I’ve passed it along to many others. The basic thesis is that we get comfortable with the negative patterns in our relationships. That, much like a security blanket, we hang onto these patterns because we know them well. I held onto these patterns for many years with my parents and have strangled past relationships by being too comfortable with these patterns. And, as soon as you recognize it and try to break free from it, your ‘dance partner’ will fight extremely hard to return you both to that comfortable pattern.
Lately, I’ve been witness to a whole lot of online communities stuck in awful dances of anger. The irony of the photo above is that it is hosted on Flickr by a non-Pro user…one who, ostensibly, has nothing to lose by just voting with their account deletion (there are also exporting tools available for the photos), but everything to win by participating in this dance of anger (shared events). But Flickr is the best of these deeply emotionally connected communities. I think the Flickr team does an amazing job of keeping their cool. They may make some unpopular decisions, but they take full responsibility and provide a strong leadership that moves on from the dances.
I’d love to hear from you regarding ways you’ve transcended the Dance of Anger, tips you have for ‘keeping your cool’ and whether or not it is important to expose fallacies (like censorship, etc.) or just walk away…and how do you walk away and help people feel listened to?
Either blog these tips or respond below.
June 18th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
My community experience has mainly been with actual live in communities so some of it may not apply with an on-line community. The first thing is for you who ever you are to recognize you own hot buttons. When they come up in the conversation pause and recognize the hot button. Yeah its hard very hard but it is I guarantee worthwhile. You will learn more from what people say about your hot button than for hours of friendly talk. But you won’t learn if you don’t listen.
If you are seeing someone else being hit by a hot button and starting to rant. Again take a moment for yourself to make sure it is not a hot issue for you one way or another. Now try and introduce a cooling question. Even if it seems stupid. Such as “Hey just what do you want to have happen. Usually a hot button means the heated one wants something to happen and yet has never really tried to explain just what he/she wants. This happens more I think with men than women. Men, at least in my experience often seem to assume every one of course knows what I mean. Asking what they mean can get you blasted for being an idiot but may also get the ranter to explain what they really want this cools them off quiet fast.
hope that helps a little.
Roger
June 19th, 2007 at 2:17 am
From what I can gather, the flickr controversy is about the introduction of “safety filters” in flickr. Some images that are deemed “unsafe” are greyed out, and when you click on one, you are told it is “outside the safety zone” and are asked if you really want to see it.
People in Germany with a yahoo.de account are not given the option to click through the safety filter to see the images. This apparently is because German law is much more strict about these sorts of things, and Yahoo Germany have done this apparently to operate within the laws of that country. (I have no idea about German law, so can’t comment on this).
I’ve been watching with growing horror at the proliferation of these sorts of protest images across the flickr landscape.
Even among contacts and friends that I like and respect… they have jumped on the bandwagon. I suspect many people do not even understand the technicalities of the issues. They have just joined the crowd because, well, everyone must be against censorship, mustn’t they?
A couple of contacts of mine who dared to speak out in opposition – asking people to think and understand the issues first – were verbally attacked in their photostreams. One of these contacts just made all his images friends-only so that he would no longer be attacked.
I find your post extremely helpful in contextualising and understanding the behaviour that is going on.
For me personally, I am by nature quiet and introspective, and suspicious of this kind of mass frenzy, so tend to step back and think before (and if) making any sort of response one way or the other in these situations.
June 24th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
http://twitter.com/missrogue/statuses/117707762
“Don’t do open source, do open development.”
What the fuck?
June 24th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Is that from my twitter? I think I typed it wrong. It was supposed to be: “Don’t just do open source, do open development.” It was from a FOO session where someone was talking about all of the code that is dumped on SourceForge that isn’t supported or worth much. Many companies open source projects because they want a PR push, not because they want to develop something positive and openly in a community.
Now…ironically, you slightly over-reacted on a post where I talk about communities over-reacting.
June 24th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Well:
- A lot of people work on open source stuff in their spare time. Just the development alone is all they can muster.
- Many of the better open source projects have excellent support/community – many people quietly go about the work of maintaining FAQs, mailing lists, software, organizing user groups and conferences, etc..
- Most Sourceforge projects never get anywhere and there’s nothing to really support. I’m always amazed at how many people apparently think they can singlehandedly create a 3D MMORPG comparable to Everquest or World of Warcraft. WoW took like 3 years to develop, and that was with a fairly large, top-notch team of game development pros!
- Plenty of proprietary software gets abandoned as well. The biggest one I can think of is Visual Basic 6.
- A lot of people who work on free software in their spare time love programming far more than creating software products.
To be clear, I know the pain (better than most people, I think) of using great free software that’s rough around the edges (a concrete example: getting the software in question to work on Windows means 5-30 minutes of fucking around with Cygwin and Visual C++, and much of the documentation is non-English).
June 27th, 2007 at 8:13 am
Great post and an interesting process list. I have a suspicion that a lot of people eagerly leaping on the “Help! Nazi!” bandwagon are a long way from No. 6 (Honor and Humiliation) and certainly don’t engage with a “Spiritual Bond” (though I think I’d like to see a fairly tight definition of what exactly a spiritual bond is). To take Flickr as an example, an inner core of ‘friends’ familiar with a photographers work may well react in line with No. 6. For everyone else, I suspect they arrived at the party waving their hot buttons. It’s rather like those MySpace shrines devoted to murdered teenagers full of posts from people who are broken hearted about someone they’ve never met.
Keeping my cool? I’m rubbish at it! Best I can do is to realise how comic I must appear. The other, difficult thing is the interrogation of my anger – not why am I angry in the sense of a cause but why am I angry in the sense of what is it in me that needs to be angry about this? And why that? Usually it’s fear of some kind. But that’s just me.
July 7th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Late to this post because I’m visiting your blog for the first time.
As a resident of Germany I take great offense at the word Nazi and bristle when I hear accusations thrown. The corollary of Godwin’s Law is that the first person to accuse the other of being a Nazi is universally accepted as having lost the argument.
What I can’t stand on the internet is once-useful forums which have gotten bogged down in useless chatter and pointless bickering between the regulars. The Lonely Planet Thorn Tree had a politics section which got so bad, they shut it down, so the regulars hived themselves off to a separate server and are still there, engaged in their silly cross-talk and blabber. It makes you wonder how much these people actually accomplish in any given day.
That said, let them go at it. No censorship!