While reading about Metcalfe’s Law, I stumbled across this vintage Clay Shirky talk on group dynamics of social media. With the exception of the Project Gutenberg discussion list (where I’m a lurker and which is its own brand of strange), what he said in 2003 still holds true for every single community forum, listserv and user group to which I have ever belonged.
You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.” And then you don’t leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about. And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups. It’s obvious that there are no groups without members. But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?
… So even if someone isn’t really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that’s beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying “You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn’t need that much description about the forest, because it’s pretty much the same forest all the way.”
So, why not just give up and walk away from blogging and flogging and twittering and figgering?
… the first answer to Why Now? is simply “Because it’s time.” I can’t tell you why it took as long for weblogs to happen as it did, except to say it had absolutely nothing to do with technology. We had every bit of technology we needed to do weblogs the day Mosaic launched the first forms-capable browser. Every single piece of it was right there. Instead, we got Geocities. Why did we get Geocities and not weblogs? We didn’t know what we were doing.
Not much has changed, but it has. The article was written six years ago, thought, which is still millenia on the internet, and Mr. Toulouse The Wet brought up an excellent point yesterday: “SM software has perhaps existed for 40 yrs but how long in real use?” As Shirky answered, “[We’re] just finding out what works. We’re still learning how to make these kinds of things.” One of the nice things about Twitter is its decentralization, i.e. unless your tweets are protected, everyone in Twitterverse can read your thoughts and respond, which allows fresh air into the room ever so often, so to speak. Then, is following only certain people, forming twibes and other groups in Twitter then counter-productive to true social media?
