After reading a post on Fred Wilson’s AVC (highly recommended), I started thinking a bit about the conceptual framework of the world as a set of loosely connected networks, and the dynamic that exists between physical and virtual communities.
As counterintuitive as this may be, the biggest problem with the way virtual networks form is that people end up grouping themselves. Because of this, networks become comfortable places connecting people that share a great deal in common. We have a natural – almost unconscious – tendency to seek out those that think like us, and we often end up in groups that simply reinforce the belief structures and world views we already had before joining them.
Consider that in light of the following: Creativity and innovation are most often born amongst limitations, and refined through disagreement and rational (even if passionate) argument. Social progress isn’t built out of consensus and congeniality, but through periods of confrontation and discord. Any quest for enlightenment and understanding ultimately forces people to shun conformity and accommodation. That is the nature of personal growth, and by extension the growth and vitality of a society.
This kind of ‘social friction’ isn’t difficult to experience in the “physical world”…
The physical world specializes in random aggregation. People of all different backgrounds and upbringings end up working with each other at their jobs and living next to each other in their neighborhoods. They shop is the same grocery stores and stand in the same lunch lines at the deli. They go to services in the same houses of worship, and suffer next to each other in the same hospitals and clinics. Diversity, in it’s many dimensions, becomes a virtue in and of itself – something to be embraced instead of avoided. Acceptance, appreciation, and integration become the natural outgrowths of this kind of social structure. And the ability of members in a social group to simply ‘agree to disagree’ on some of the more contentious things allows for diversity to continue thriving without the need for either conflict or conformity.
Many online communities, in contrast, seem to specialize more in homogeneity. They tend to form around common interests or activities, and often discourage conflict and debate outside of very narrow threads of discussion. Anyone that strays too far from the “standard of acceptable behavior” can easily be silenced or removed from the community. More often, they are driven away by simply being unwelcome – either attacked or ignored when voicing an opinion that strays too far from the ‘mainstream’. Online social groupings that end up functioning in this way ultimately stagnate, and the dynamic that may have made them initially attractive becomes lost – replaced sometimes by an orthodoxy that may attract adherents but few others.
I do appreciate the reason for this pattern of behavior. In a completely unregulated social environment like the web, sowing discord is almost a sport with some people. It seems there are ‘trolls’ lurking at the edge of any discussion waiting to become disruptive and counterproductive – effectively ruining the value of a community for all of the other participants. Every community needs some basic standards and enforcement policy to remain relevant as it grows. Every successful society is built around some set of core beliefs and corresponding rules that allows it to function and flourish. The unfortunate temptation here though is to not simply curate behavior, but to also start curating thought and opinion in the interest of group harmony.
Online or in the physical world, that’s not a place we want to end up.