RTFM-6: Social Computing.
Before I begin, I would like to apologize for my brief hiatus, I've been going through some relationship stuff. Even a sentence about myself it too much for this weblog, so onto the meat:
For those of you not taking this class, RTFM stands for Read The Fucking Manual. Although, the class register office seems to be under the illusion that it stands for Research Teams, Fundamentals and Management. I have no idea where they got that from.
So to start things off, I bring you Jim's Postulate of Human Social Systems, which states: given n individuals, as the limit of n approaches the population size, the probability that it contains a member not in a social group approaches H. Statistics show H is approximately equal to 0. In more plain English: Everybody is somebody to someone. It is this fundamental law which governs Social Systems. As people tend to matter to other people they form social groups and interact (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly). Out of these groups, social norms arise (this is the basis for sociology). In the remainder of this article I will attempt illustrate several examples of this.
The first example is Goodwin's Law. The American attorney Mike Goodwin observed that given a long enough internet discussion, eventually someone will make a comparison to Hitler or Nazism in general. As this has generally been accepted as a bad thing, many forums and newsgroups (such as UseNet which can be accessed through Google groups) have responded by recognizing such references as the point at which a discussion has played itself out, and as a result terminated the discussion. Now obviously any intentional reference for the purpose of prematurely ending the discussion will be ignored (called Quirk's exception). The evolution of such a social norm clearly indicates that social computing has reached the point where actual societies are formed by the presence of successful social computing applications (in this case newsgroup).
Often times people will dispute Goodwin's Law on the basis that comparisons to Hitler or Nazism is perfectly acceptable. They will reference cases such as: "Just because he improved the economy doesn't make him a good leader. Even Hitler improved the economy,"(ibid wikipedia). Goodwin's law can be argued as existing specifically for the purpose of stopping just this kind of comparison as the intentional reference to Hitler is a purposeful attempt at biasing the discussion by playing on people's emotional reactions to Hitler and what he has done. Instead, in such cases, Hitler should be substituted with: "Even bad leaders," with possible examples provided as necessary.
So what have we learned? Internet communities are valid communities due to the existence of social norms. But let's look at another social norm.
As most of you probably know I spend allot of time in an IRC chat room on LCIRC.net. This chat room as been affectionately titled #AlbinoBlackSheep (all irc chat rooms start with a #). In my time there I have noticed the emergence of a new social norm. Whenever a user (generally new ones, often referred to as newbies) asks for a person’s age or gender, they are met with either hostility or satire. Apparently over time this community has developed a norm.
The reasons for this norm are overly complex, but suffice to say, a large number of people join the chat room every year for the purposes of either engaging in cybersex, or pretending to and then changing their gender at the last second to make fun of the other person. At first this is either amusing, or ignorable, but over time the number of people entering for this purpose has reached levels where it has become disruptive to the community, resulting in the norm. Now, as it is a social norm and therefore self enforcing, over time the number of users who ask questions (like asl) are immediately attacked reducing the number of occurrences over time. It has embedded itself into the resident culture and making such questions the equivalent of social rape.
This leads me to Jim's Law of Internet Gender: In any sufficiently developed internet community, while acts such as cyber sex continue to be stigmatized, attempts to discern a user’s gender will be met with scorn or satire.
taken from: Wikipedia and Part One of a Three Part Lecture on Social Computing given by Jim Tzenes
Before I begin, I would like to apologize for my brief hiatus, I've been going through some relationship stuff. Even a sentence about myself it too much for this weblog, so onto the meat:
For those of you not taking this class, RTFM stands for Read The Fucking Manual. Although, the class register office seems to be under the illusion that it stands for Research Teams, Fundamentals and Management. I have no idea where they got that from.
So to start things off, I bring you Jim's Postulate of Human Social Systems, which states: given n individuals, as the limit of n approaches the population size, the probability that it contains a member not in a social group approaches H. Statistics show H is approximately equal to 0. In more plain English: Everybody is somebody to someone. It is this fundamental law which governs Social Systems. As people tend to matter to other people they form social groups and interact (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly). Out of these groups, social norms arise (this is the basis for sociology). In the remainder of this article I will attempt illustrate several examples of this.
The first example is Goodwin's Law. The American attorney Mike Goodwin observed that given a long enough internet discussion, eventually someone will make a comparison to Hitler or Nazism in general. As this has generally been accepted as a bad thing, many forums and newsgroups (such as UseNet which can be accessed through Google groups) have responded by recognizing such references as the point at which a discussion has played itself out, and as a result terminated the discussion. Now obviously any intentional reference for the purpose of prematurely ending the discussion will be ignored (called Quirk's exception). The evolution of such a social norm clearly indicates that social computing has reached the point where actual societies are formed by the presence of successful social computing applications (in this case newsgroup).
Often times people will dispute Goodwin's Law on the basis that comparisons to Hitler or Nazism is perfectly acceptable. They will reference cases such as: "Just because he improved the economy doesn't make him a good leader. Even Hitler improved the economy,"(ibid wikipedia). Goodwin's law can be argued as existing specifically for the purpose of stopping just this kind of comparison as the intentional reference to Hitler is a purposeful attempt at biasing the discussion by playing on people's emotional reactions to Hitler and what he has done. Instead, in such cases, Hitler should be substituted with: "Even bad leaders," with possible examples provided as necessary.
So what have we learned? Internet communities are valid communities due to the existence of social norms. But let's look at another social norm.
As most of you probably know I spend allot of time in an IRC chat room on LCIRC.net. This chat room as been affectionately titled #AlbinoBlackSheep (all irc chat rooms start with a #). In my time there I have noticed the emergence of a new social norm. Whenever a user (generally new ones, often referred to as newbies) asks for a person’s age or gender, they are met with either hostility or satire. Apparently over time this community has developed a norm.
The reasons for this norm are overly complex, but suffice to say, a large number of people join the chat room every year for the purposes of either engaging in cybersex, or pretending to and then changing their gender at the last second to make fun of the other person. At first this is either amusing, or ignorable, but over time the number of people entering for this purpose has reached levels where it has become disruptive to the community, resulting in the norm. Now, as it is a social norm and therefore self enforcing, over time the number of users who ask questions (like asl) are immediately attacked reducing the number of occurrences over time. It has embedded itself into the resident culture and making such questions the equivalent of social rape.
This leads me to Jim's Law of Internet Gender: In any sufficiently developed internet community, while acts such as cyber sex continue to be stigmatized, attempts to discern a user’s gender will be met with scorn or satire.
taken from: Wikipedia and Part One of a Three Part Lecture on Social Computing given by Jim Tzenes
posted by jim at 9/24/2005 02:13:00 PM
1 Comments:
My sampling size is actually larger than just this singular community. If we look at more sophisticated communities: slashdot, Usenet, etc. They all follow this particular pattern. Even in less sophisticated communities such as: myg0t forums or amazon.com, this trend holds true.
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