Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0

After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets

Tara Brabazon

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781843346951
• eBook ISBN: 9781780633022
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Ciencias computacionales general

Digital Dialogue and Community 2.0: After avatars, trolls and puppets explores the communities that use digital platforms, portals, and applications from daily life to build relationships beyond geographical locality and family links. The book provides detailed analyses of how technology realigns the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. This book reveals that alongside every engaged, nurturing and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed, or forgotten. It explores the argument that community is not an inevitable result of communication. Following an introduction from the Editor, the book is then divided into four sections exploring communities and resistance, structures of sharing, professional communication and fandom and consumption. Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0 combines ethnographic methods and professional expertise to open new spaces for thinking about language, identity, and social connections. - Provides innovative interdisciplinary research, incorporating Library and Information Management, Internet Studies, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Disability Studies and Community Management - Offers a balanced approach between the 'bottom up' and 'top down' development of online communities - Demonstrates the consequences on the configuration of a community when consumers become producers and their lives and experiences are commodified

Part 1

Communities, Exiles and Resistance

1

The inevitable exile: a missing link in online community discourse

Venessa Paech

Abstract:

This chapter develops a new concept: ‘the exile’. Within an online community, there is a range of characters and relationships. However, when a former member of the online community continues to return and harass members, a series of strategies is required from community managers to create unity against the chaos. This chapter reveals and assesses those options.

Key words

exile

community management

trolls

identity tourism

As more of us meet, work, shop, play and mate in virtually mediated zones, it follows that we will be concerned with obstacles that block the articulation and performance of these everyday activities. A typological family tree of mischief-makers and deviants has been mapped over decades of electronically mediated interaction between individuals, groups and communities.¹ Principal archetypes identified by scholars, criminologists and users are trolls, spammers, flamers, hackers, identity thieves, groomers, sock puppets, stalkers and pirates. But this bestiary of digital disruptors has a missing link – the community exile – who exists between the boundaries and borders of membership. A unique construct of authentic online community, the exile is empowered by a networked culture of identity recasting, out of touch policy-makers and technologists happy to fill the leadership gap.

Paul Levinson suggests that ‘many of us are quick to laud nature as a model for technology. The truth is we prefer our devices to be unnaturally consistent’.² We expect the same of our online communities. The corporate world, in particular, would prefer the virtual consumer groups it hosts or supports to emotionally transact with a predictive, low-overhead, simplicity. The reality is that digital enclaves are created, powered and destroyed by messy, bloodied, unpredictable human animals. We cannot live in a world of networked tribes and not encounter warfare and expulsion. There are unmapped fault lines in our digital territories that compel and impugn certain people, spurring aftershocks that disrupt system levels, ebbs and flows. Community manager and author Patrick O’Keefe presents an uncomfortable truth: ‘Creepy Banned User Guy (or Girl) is a Part of the Community Administrator’s Life’.³ Community territory is a contested zone, where differences and conflict are inevitable. A successful community is personal, but its consequences are social. They include the making – and monitoring – of exiles across these differences. If a community has form, meaning and context, then it will have lines that can be crossed.

The exile may adopt behaviours of other bad actors. They flame other community members with a vicious agenda. They deliberately post incendiary topics to incite heated responses, then sit back and watch the carnage. They attempt socially engineered hacks to identity and exchange. They stalk the collective. But although they can mimic a troll, sock-puppet or hacker, they are a different meta-type, absent from prevailing hierarchies. The exile is so innately defined by a singular community that revenge or re-entry becomes a consuming obsession.

Day, Farenden and Goss affirm that ‘[w]hatever social changes have occurred as a result of socio-economic policies, urban development and ICT infrastructure, community remains the building block of society’.⁴ This continues to be borne out in the internet ‘space’, where the ascendancy of social networks is driving a prevailing discourse of relationships, reputation and influence. It is not just rhetoric. Online communities are a formative aspect of social living for many. In studying the vast online youth world of Habbo, Vili Lehdonvirta and Pekka Rasanen found that young people felt as close to their virtual friends as to offline family or peers.⁵

Buried underneath the popular discourse of social media revolution in the daily grind of online community is the hidden discursive of the exiles. They thrive in an environment with limited filters and unlimited lives. Community managers tell researchers that their resistance, often primitive and juvenile, is inexorable:

Real, hands on community management requires the ruffling of feathers. Not on purpose, not intentionally – but naturally. It’s just a fact of life… if no one hates you, you aren’t doing everything you can.⁶

Part of belonging is unbelonging. Just as community custodians find themselves the target of users who do not wish to abide by community guidelines, so do those users find their place on a spectrum of ‘otherness’ To be an effective ‘other’, one must intimately understand its opposite – the familial.

Place is the thing

The most successful online communities enable a cogent sense of place. Social networks such as Facebook or Twitter may host a collection of smaller communities within their walls, but the platforms themselves are not a community. As online community researcher and designer Lizzie Jackson explains

Online communities and social networks are very different, the first offers a sense of place, the other is not a place but a kind of group consciousness grown from comments, images, addresses, photos, and appointments to do something or be somewhere (whether real or virtual).⁷

While an online community possesses a group consciousness, a network does not necessarily coalesce around place and purpose. Howard Rheingold invokes the work of urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to articulate the palpability of place for an online tribe:

Although the casual conversation that takes place in cafes, beauty shops, pubs and town squares is universally considered to be trivial, idle talk, Oldenburg makes the case that such places are where communities can come into being and continue to hold together. They are the unacknowledged agorae of modern life.⁸

The online community exile is forged and distinguished by his or her one time active participation in community discourse. The rituals, practices and history that comprise this discourse depend on a socio-spatial consistency, the pull of the agorae. As Jan Fernback reminds us, within our cyberspaces ‘[t]here is a there there’.⁹ Rules, conventions, habits, posting histories, avatars and blow ups provide layers of cultural wallpaper for residents of an authentic online community. These exiles are shaped by this motivated relationship to place and space, and they carry it beyond community boundaries when they are expunged. As Tara Brabazon suggests in the introduction to this collection, one way to frame this topology is a nation state model. Benedict Anderson’s working theory of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, at once ‘inherently limited and sovereign’,¹⁰ has long been a constitutional allegory for the virtual collective. Unified through remote interfaces, these digital citizens may never meet in the flesh. Yet, as Anderson writes, ‘in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.¹¹ In this fashion, the online community can become a nation state and body politic to citizens who have been exiled by their peers or leaders. Their existences and identities, included in their resistances, are calibrated against this state. Tara Brabazon explains how disembodied community can give rise to delinquent or subterranean expressions:

When theorising virtual communities from the perspectives of national imaginings, it is clear that these social organisations are on the same discursive bandwidth. Both are disembodied modes of communication. The national body politic, like internet politics, is a metaphoric entity. While cyberspace grafts a keyboard prosthesis to the body, the nation state is a political prosthesis. Both result in deterritorialisation and disorientation. For a dispossessed population, the key is to use guerrilla tactics to create alternative spaces of meaning, memory and identity.¹²

The community body is a dense site for a member stripped of citizenship, a truth illuminated by Jones’ early model of online community as a settlement of techno-social artefacts ripe for excavation.¹³ While Jones is concerned with the empirical ebb and flow of social currents and stresses through a technical gaze, his invocation of bounded online community as a ‘virtual tell’ (a cyber-version of the mounds of human settlement debris in the Middle East) reveals the consequences of elective investment over time in a discrete environment. When members of online communities request the removal of all of their content, excavation is required. A post does not stand in isolation. It is nestled in a threaded p...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of tables and boxes
• List of abbreviations
• About the contributors
• Introduction: new imaginings
• Part 1: Communities, Exiles and Resistance
• Part 2: Structures for Sharing
• Part 3: Professions, Production, Consumptions
• Part 4: Fandom, Consumption and Community
• Conclusion: white men rule?
• References
• Index