Random philosophical musings
May. 18th, 2007 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjHaving previously mused on metaphoric models and understandings for various types of on-line communication, my philosophical backbrain has been turning itself to the topic of on-line "presence" and visibility. That is, what are the various modes of being visible in different on-line formats; what are their strengths and pitfalls? And how do they contribute to one's "existence" on-line?
As I see it, there are three basic (very basic) functions that an on-line interaction can have for an individual user: to receive information (with "information" interpreted very loosely), to provide information, and to negotiate social status. I'm not using "status" here in the narrow sense of position in a hierarchy, but in a much looser sense of "the nature and shape of one's virtual existence as it relates to others."
Receiving information is, I suspect, the most pervasive function. While it's quite possible for someone to send postings to mailing lists, set up web sites, create a blog, etc. etc. such that one puts out information without ever receiving any in return (by that medium), in practice it stands out as unusual and -- I suspect -- so non-prototypical that it will grate on most people. Think back to some time when you've seen a posting on a newsgroup or mailing list where a participant was relaying the words of someone who was not a member of the community. Did it feel a bit odd? Did you have some response you wanted to make but didn't know how to engage with the writer? Did you feel like you'd been patronized, in some fashion, by somone who couldn't be bothered to be a member of the community that was being talked to? Ok, maybe not. Or more likely, it depends. But this is edging more into the "negotiating status" aspect, so I'm getting ahead of my theoretical structure. (I have a theoretical structure?) In any case, the person who receives information without significantly providing any in return is such a prototypical part of on-line interactions that we have a label: the lurker. I don't think I've encountered a labelled category for the counterpart -- the person who delivers information without receiving any in return.
Negotiating status comes from both the provision and receipt of information, but almost more from the shape and pattern of the interactions than from the content itself. Personal response ("personal" in the sense of "a response that provides a clear reference to the person/item that inspired the response") is the most basic form. It's the on-line cosmos acknowledging your existence. Frequency of response is meaningful. Nature of response, sometimes less so. (Hence the prevalence of people saying things that are the verbal equivalent of poking the bear with a sharp stick.) Private responses are a minimalist form ("the lurkers support me in e-mail") because while they negotiate status between the two participants, they don't communicate that negotiation to the larger community.
But enough of the basics, let's move on to ways that different forms of electronic presence interact with these. Let's start with the mailing list. A mailing list prototypically requires active initiation (joining the list) and prototypically assumes receipt of all information provided to the list. It also prototypically assumes that any information provided to the list will be received by all members. You need not "participate", but if you do, it will be in full public view. The community defined by a list may, in theory, be of any size, it will be of a known (or at least knowable) size and make-up, and will tend to provide at least an illusion of moderate privacy. One's social status on one particular list will not generally leak out into the world at large -- although one's social status on multiple lists and forums will eventually reach a synergistic state where a general meta-status is generated that reaches beyond one's personal on-line presence.
The primary half-life of a mailing list posting is generally brief but measurable -- the amount of time your message is likely to linger in the in-box of someone who has read it, is thinking about responding, but has not yet decided that the topic has grown stale. This half-life will depend to some extent on the nature of the topic. A question about directions to tomorrow's event will be seen to be stale quickly. The latest flame war (whatever it is) will have a relatively short half-life, but one of perhaps days to a week. A conversation that burns less hotly, or where people take time to compose responses, may stretch out for weeks. However even in the presences of mailing list archives (and even with publicly-readable archives) it is rare for truly ancient topics to be commented on directly (as opposed to being resurrected anew).
Compare and contrast this with one's participation in a usenet newsgroup. In contrast with the active (if trivial) initiation required to joint a mailing list, participation in newsgroups may be performed in a drive-by fashion (although it's rarely the norm). Any illusion of privacy for postings is self-delusional. The primary half-live of postings tends to be quite short -- even setting aside the expiration of articles on servers, people seem less likely to mark usenet articles for later response. The secondary half-life, on the other hand, is much longer. By this I include responses to postings that have been turned up by search engines (e.g., on Google Groups) or by retracing message threads at a later date. And while the newsgroup poster who doesn't notice (or doesn't care) that they are replying to a 6-month-old message is generally building a negative social status, it's far more common than the same event in mailing lists.
My extremely subjective impression is that being replied to is more critical to one's social status in a newsgroup than it is on a mailing list. Assuming that this is an accurate observation, I suspect it's related to the extension of the primary half-life of one's postings created by quoting and threading. My perception is that newsgroups tend to retain more of the "history" of a conversation in active and identifiable form than mailing lists do. So if your contribution is responded to, your "presence" in the conversation becomes multiplied significantly.
To switch tracks for a moment from prototypically interactive modes, let's ponder the web site for a moment. Web sites are, at heart, about providing information and only secondarily receiving information. Instead of social status being negotiated by direct conversation, it is built by "knowledge of" -- the extent to which your site is the place people go for the information you provide, and to which they direct other people to your site as opposed to alternatives. This may take the form of ad hoc verbal referrals, or it may be quantitatively measurable by things such as the algorithm by which Google listings are ordered. (That Google ordering is considered a quantitive measure of social status is demonstrated by the glee with which people boast about where their site turns up on a search for desirable keywords.) Web sites have an essentially indefinite primary half-life (and, thanks to cache sites like the wayback machine, even a significant secondary half-life). But it's also the case that the creator of a web site has the option to be relatively ignorant about the social-status effects it produces.
Blogs and journals create something of a hybrid between mailing lists and web sites. Superficially, they would appear to be designed primarily for the provision of information. And yet, in strong contrast to mailing lists and newsgroups, there is no automatically built-in audience for that information. So the negotiation of social status via a blog first presumes the construction of an audience. Using Live Journal as an example (since it's the structure I'm familiar with), this construction of an audience can be jump-started on a small scale by announcing one's existence to other public journals, or by joining a community and either posting something that functions as an announcement on the community or more passively exposing one's journal to notice via the "friends list" of the community. But the creating of an audience is -- to a large extent -- the most objective measurement of one's social status via a blog.
Many aspects of the blog experience are dictated not so much by the structure of the system, but by the typical ways people use it. In theory, one could consider the primary half-life of a blog posting to be as indefinite as a web site. It's all there to read for as long as the blog exists. But in practice, the reading habits of journalers (thinking more of the personal journal types of blogs rather than the formal columnist types) result in an extremely short half-life -- shorter even than a usenet group. And the use of reading filters means that you can't necessarily assume that even your entire theoretical audience will default to reading your contributions. So the indefinite existence of a blog's archives, in practical terms, should be considered secondary half-life. This is even clearer in the interactional aspect. The primary half-life of conversations generated by blog postings is as the life of a mayfly. Despite the tools offered by various blog hosts, the prototypical expectation is that once you have read and responded to someone else's post, you will be blind to any further conversation in that thread. An particularly interesting post-and-conversation may lead you to return later, but as a general rule, blog-generated conversations have a lifetime (not just a half-life) of one reading cycle. And the majority of that conversation will be invisible even to most of your audience -- whether because they don't open up the comments view or because the comments were posted after they moved on. So the conversation aspect of a blog contributes to social status much more similarly to private e-mails than to some of the more interactional formats.
To the extent that social status is negotiated by the simple existence of responses (or by frequency), blog-generated status is greatly affected by the "what have you written for me lately" effect. So just at social status in face-to-face communities can be attenuated by physical absence from gatherings, social status in the blog community can be fatally attenuated by lack of new postings. The "mutual friend" who never posts anything of their own is as invisible via that medium as the lurker who reads but doesn't subscribe (to your public postings). And the person who doesn't post in their own journal but does post comments in other people's journals is functionally as invisible as the newsgroup/mailing list member who only responds to postings via private e-mail.
Well, lunch hour is over and it's time to get back to work, so that makes a fairly tidy stopping point.
As I see it, there are three basic (very basic) functions that an on-line interaction can have for an individual user: to receive information (with "information" interpreted very loosely), to provide information, and to negotiate social status. I'm not using "status" here in the narrow sense of position in a hierarchy, but in a much looser sense of "the nature and shape of one's virtual existence as it relates to others."
Receiving information is, I suspect, the most pervasive function. While it's quite possible for someone to send postings to mailing lists, set up web sites, create a blog, etc. etc. such that one puts out information without ever receiving any in return (by that medium), in practice it stands out as unusual and -- I suspect -- so non-prototypical that it will grate on most people. Think back to some time when you've seen a posting on a newsgroup or mailing list where a participant was relaying the words of someone who was not a member of the community. Did it feel a bit odd? Did you have some response you wanted to make but didn't know how to engage with the writer? Did you feel like you'd been patronized, in some fashion, by somone who couldn't be bothered to be a member of the community that was being talked to? Ok, maybe not. Or more likely, it depends. But this is edging more into the "negotiating status" aspect, so I'm getting ahead of my theoretical structure. (I have a theoretical structure?) In any case, the person who receives information without significantly providing any in return is such a prototypical part of on-line interactions that we have a label: the lurker. I don't think I've encountered a labelled category for the counterpart -- the person who delivers information without receiving any in return.
Negotiating status comes from both the provision and receipt of information, but almost more from the shape and pattern of the interactions than from the content itself. Personal response ("personal" in the sense of "a response that provides a clear reference to the person/item that inspired the response") is the most basic form. It's the on-line cosmos acknowledging your existence. Frequency of response is meaningful. Nature of response, sometimes less so. (Hence the prevalence of people saying things that are the verbal equivalent of poking the bear with a sharp stick.) Private responses are a minimalist form ("the lurkers support me in e-mail") because while they negotiate status between the two participants, they don't communicate that negotiation to the larger community.
But enough of the basics, let's move on to ways that different forms of electronic presence interact with these. Let's start with the mailing list. A mailing list prototypically requires active initiation (joining the list) and prototypically assumes receipt of all information provided to the list. It also prototypically assumes that any information provided to the list will be received by all members. You need not "participate", but if you do, it will be in full public view. The community defined by a list may, in theory, be of any size, it will be of a known (or at least knowable) size and make-up, and will tend to provide at least an illusion of moderate privacy. One's social status on one particular list will not generally leak out into the world at large -- although one's social status on multiple lists and forums will eventually reach a synergistic state where a general meta-status is generated that reaches beyond one's personal on-line presence.
The primary half-life of a mailing list posting is generally brief but measurable -- the amount of time your message is likely to linger in the in-box of someone who has read it, is thinking about responding, but has not yet decided that the topic has grown stale. This half-life will depend to some extent on the nature of the topic. A question about directions to tomorrow's event will be seen to be stale quickly. The latest flame war (whatever it is) will have a relatively short half-life, but one of perhaps days to a week. A conversation that burns less hotly, or where people take time to compose responses, may stretch out for weeks. However even in the presences of mailing list archives (and even with publicly-readable archives) it is rare for truly ancient topics to be commented on directly (as opposed to being resurrected anew).
Compare and contrast this with one's participation in a usenet newsgroup. In contrast with the active (if trivial) initiation required to joint a mailing list, participation in newsgroups may be performed in a drive-by fashion (although it's rarely the norm). Any illusion of privacy for postings is self-delusional. The primary half-live of postings tends to be quite short -- even setting aside the expiration of articles on servers, people seem less likely to mark usenet articles for later response. The secondary half-life, on the other hand, is much longer. By this I include responses to postings that have been turned up by search engines (e.g., on Google Groups) or by retracing message threads at a later date. And while the newsgroup poster who doesn't notice (or doesn't care) that they are replying to a 6-month-old message is generally building a negative social status, it's far more common than the same event in mailing lists.
My extremely subjective impression is that being replied to is more critical to one's social status in a newsgroup than it is on a mailing list. Assuming that this is an accurate observation, I suspect it's related to the extension of the primary half-life of one's postings created by quoting and threading. My perception is that newsgroups tend to retain more of the "history" of a conversation in active and identifiable form than mailing lists do. So if your contribution is responded to, your "presence" in the conversation becomes multiplied significantly.
To switch tracks for a moment from prototypically interactive modes, let's ponder the web site for a moment. Web sites are, at heart, about providing information and only secondarily receiving information. Instead of social status being negotiated by direct conversation, it is built by "knowledge of" -- the extent to which your site is the place people go for the information you provide, and to which they direct other people to your site as opposed to alternatives. This may take the form of ad hoc verbal referrals, or it may be quantitatively measurable by things such as the algorithm by which Google listings are ordered. (That Google ordering is considered a quantitive measure of social status is demonstrated by the glee with which people boast about where their site turns up on a search for desirable keywords.) Web sites have an essentially indefinite primary half-life (and, thanks to cache sites like the wayback machine, even a significant secondary half-life). But it's also the case that the creator of a web site has the option to be relatively ignorant about the social-status effects it produces.
Blogs and journals create something of a hybrid between mailing lists and web sites. Superficially, they would appear to be designed primarily for the provision of information. And yet, in strong contrast to mailing lists and newsgroups, there is no automatically built-in audience for that information. So the negotiation of social status via a blog first presumes the construction of an audience. Using Live Journal as an example (since it's the structure I'm familiar with), this construction of an audience can be jump-started on a small scale by announcing one's existence to other public journals, or by joining a community and either posting something that functions as an announcement on the community or more passively exposing one's journal to notice via the "friends list" of the community. But the creating of an audience is -- to a large extent -- the most objective measurement of one's social status via a blog.
Many aspects of the blog experience are dictated not so much by the structure of the system, but by the typical ways people use it. In theory, one could consider the primary half-life of a blog posting to be as indefinite as a web site. It's all there to read for as long as the blog exists. But in practice, the reading habits of journalers (thinking more of the personal journal types of blogs rather than the formal columnist types) result in an extremely short half-life -- shorter even than a usenet group. And the use of reading filters means that you can't necessarily assume that even your entire theoretical audience will default to reading your contributions. So the indefinite existence of a blog's archives, in practical terms, should be considered secondary half-life. This is even clearer in the interactional aspect. The primary half-life of conversations generated by blog postings is as the life of a mayfly. Despite the tools offered by various blog hosts, the prototypical expectation is that once you have read and responded to someone else's post, you will be blind to any further conversation in that thread. An particularly interesting post-and-conversation may lead you to return later, but as a general rule, blog-generated conversations have a lifetime (not just a half-life) of one reading cycle. And the majority of that conversation will be invisible even to most of your audience -- whether because they don't open up the comments view or because the comments were posted after they moved on. So the conversation aspect of a blog contributes to social status much more similarly to private e-mails than to some of the more interactional formats.
To the extent that social status is negotiated by the simple existence of responses (or by frequency), blog-generated status is greatly affected by the "what have you written for me lately" effect. So just at social status in face-to-face communities can be attenuated by physical absence from gatherings, social status in the blog community can be fatally attenuated by lack of new postings. The "mutual friend" who never posts anything of their own is as invisible via that medium as the lurker who reads but doesn't subscribe (to your public postings). And the person who doesn't post in their own journal but does post comments in other people's journals is functionally as invisible as the newsgroup/mailing list member who only responds to postings via private e-mail.
Well, lunch hour is over and it's time to get back to work, so that makes a fairly tidy stopping point.
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no subject
Date: 2007-05-19 04:45 pm (UTC)Interesting...I've given nebulous thought to this topic, myself.
Date: 2007-05-19 05:16 pm (UTC)I consider the "troll" to be a malignant subset of this category. Like someone who intrudes on another's conversation to interject a strong opinion in an offensive manner, then refuses to listen to any rebuttal or rebuke of their behavior, the troll interjects himself into the newsgroup's threads with no interest in gaining information (about either the topic or himself) in return. Instead, this is the sort of person who kicks over anthills just to watch the chaos he caused. His gratification comes from the attention he gets, not the contents of that attention.
Re: Interesting...I've given nebulous thought to this topic, myself.
Date: 2007-05-20 05:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-05-21 12:24 am (UTC)One of the features I consider essential on LJ -- and lacking on most blog sites -- is threaded commenting. That's what moves it from one-to-many (publisher) and many-to-one (commenters) to many-to-many. It's the same kind of interaction that you can have on a good, smaller mailing list, though there are differences -- half-life, as you point out, and the easier cross-fertilization on LJ (I can't as easily find out what other mailing lists you participate in).
Communication styles shape technology but the reverse is also true and perhaps the stronger force: we fall into patterns based on the tools available. I find all of this fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2007-05-21 06:21 am (UTC)What really feels odd is being the "someone who was not a member of the community." I have several times been told that I was being quoted on, for instance, H-Costume. A peculiar sensation.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-07 08:23 pm (UTC)I'm gonna have to digest this. Good food for thought though.