Year: 2004

Categories
Connecting Diversity

No other word works but great

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m at work on a longer essay for later today or tomorrow on another topic, but I wanted to make a comment about the gay marriages in San Francisco.

Watching the story online and on TV about Gavin Newsom’s carefully planned act of defiance against the State of California, the weekend of gay marriages in San Francisco, the ecstatic faces of the people married – among all the bad news lately, it is a true bright spot.

And it’s not just Newsom – city officials volunteered their three day weekend in order to grant marriage licenses and perform weddings. It was a pure delight to see it, and this is one of those few times I wish I had been back in San Francisco. I would have loved to throw confetti and rice over the newly married couples as they left City Hall.

And the weddings continue because judges have refused to issue immediate stays on the issuance of marriage licenses, even though two groups have tried to get them stopped.

And why are they stopping the marriages? What possible harm can it be to allow gays to marry? That isn’t going to encourage people to become homosexual. It isn’t going to undermine the concept of marriage for the straights. If anything, gays may bring a more stable element: some of the people who have been getting married have been together 30, 40, even 50 years. Fifty percent of straight marriages end in divorce. Exactly what have we done for the institution lately?

Look at this picture that I copied from the Chronicle – is this the photo of two criminals committing a crime against humanity?

marriage.jpg

Only if your view of humanity is very narrow, and your sense of what is criminal is very wide.

And the stories. My favorite is the following, from the Chronicle:

Melinda McCallister, 25, and Jennifer Kemmet, 23, drove Tuesday from Los Angeles. As they got to the door of the clerk’s office at 4 p.m., they were told that they’d have to come back today because the office was closing for the day; the couple before them was to be the last one to get in.

They sat down and cried. The door reopened and a worker yelled, “Hey L.A.! ‘’ and let them in.

They emerged from City Hall an hour later with a marriage certificate in hand.

This news coming out of San Francisco, is the first news I’ve heard in a month, over a month, of the triumph of the human spirit, the fire of those who will not accept the dictates of a hypocritical society, and the goodness of people reaching out to other people.

How can it be so damn bad?

Governor Schwarzenegger, that poster boy for good heterosexual behavior, talks about how this is a violation of an act passed by the California voters.

“I support all of California’s existing laws that provide domestic partnership benefits and protections,’’ Schwarzenegger said. However, he said, “Californians spoke on the issue of same-sex-marriage’’ when voters approved of Proposition 22, the 2000 initiative that defines marriage as between a man and a woman. “I support that law and encourage San Francisco officials to obey that law,’’ he said.

The beauty of a country that’s a republic rather than a true democracy is that majority may rule, but minority have rights – and if California has decreed that gays may not be discriminated against, then this law is a violation of that basic right.

Fuck the majority who have nothing better to do then react in fear to change!

I have heard the most outrageous attacks against gay marriage:

“What’s to stop mothers from marrying sons?”

“This will only serve to breed more homosexuality.”

“Marriage is a natural act, between a man and a woman.”

“Gays marrying will undermine the integrity of marriage.”

“Queers belong back in the closet instead of out in the open, kissing and things.”

That last is my own because most people won’t say this out loud, but you know that’s the true story behind the fear of gay marriage.

I remember one incident, walking home one night when I was in college, in Ellensburg a fairly conservative town in Washington. The Gay Students group had just broken up and I was following two guys who were holding hands. Just holding hands.

They heard my footsteps behind them and jerked their hands apart and hastily moved away from each other, both turning to look behind them in fear.

My god that people have to act this way in this country because others have such sad, pathetic lives that all they can do is interfere with the happiness, or needs, of others. My god, and that is the key isn’t it? My ‘god’. I bet it just burns you up when I use ‘god’ in lower case, as an average thing rather than a diety.

Why don’t you pass a law making this illegal?

No, the only reason I can think of for people to continue to get angry about gay marriage is that these same people are afraid of challenges to their sense of normalcy. They say:

Sex is between a man and a woman. A family consists of a mother and a father and kids. Marriage is for straight people only. Marriage is a holy state. God has willed this.

They mean:

My world has been upset too much the last few years, and I can’t handle any more change in it. I want my normal life back. I want the terror to go away. I want the gays to fade back into the shadows. I want everyone to believe like I do so that my faith isn’t questioned and I don’t have to listen to anything that might make me doubt it.

Because if I once begin to doubt my faith, I may start to doubt every aspect of my life, and I can’t handle that.

Your freedom is not worth shaking up my world. If I see you holding hands in public, my world will crack. If I see you married, my world will shatter.

I don’t want any more change. I don’t want any more change. I don’t want any more change.

But how do you keep them on the farm once they’ve seen Gay Pairee?

freetomarry.jpg

Too great not to pass on

From an SFGate.com story by David Kravets and Lisa Leff, AP writers:

Two judges delayed taking any action Tuesday to shut down San Francisco’s same-sex wedding spree, citing court procedures as they temporarily rebuffed conservative groups enraged that the city’s liberal politicians had already married almost 2,400 gay and lesbian couples.

The second judge told the plaintiffs that they would likely succeed on the merits eventually, but that for now, he couldn’t accept their proposed court order because of a punctuation error.

It all came down to a semicolon, the judge said.

“I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal … That semicolon is a big deal,” said San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren.

The Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund had asked the judge to issue an order commanding the city to “cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court.”

“The way you’ve written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word ‘or’,” the judge told them. “I don’t have the authority to issue it under these circumstances.”…

Lawyers for both sides then spent hours arguing about punctuation and court procedures during the hearing, which was still continuing late Tuesday afternoon.

(via Language Hat)

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Listening to you

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m not sure what happened. I was writing about a personal revelation I had and then somehow the writing became filtered and morphed until some people see echo chambers and other people – too many other people – see it as an attack against an established (pick one: elitist/egalitarian) person/group.

At first I thought the original problem was the example I used, but no, from many of the comments left with my writing, I could see that people were understanding what I said. But then somewhere along the way, the tone changed and each person came along and picked out the pertinent bits and tossed the rest away.

(Tell me, if you’re served a stew at a friends house, would you dig out the beef and toss the potatoes on the floor?)

I thought, well maybe it’s my writing. Maybe my writing really isn’t that great, or I am not making my points effectively. Where before I was talking about a personal revelation– that whole writer/community member thing– perhaps people were reading attack. I made an error in my writing by somehow putting to much focus on the incident rather than my own personal ruminations.

But then there was this little tidbit, left by Dave Rogers:

Now, an interesting question would be to wonder if Don Park would have offered his comment, which he subsequently withdrew because he felt it would distract from another message he wished to convey, if he hadn’t perceived that Marc had pulled the invitation? And, if he had not, would Shelley have offered this essay?

As to the first question, my guess is probably not. As to the second, my guess is Shelley probably would have addressed the issues in this essay at a later time in response to a different event, similar in kind to this one.

Bang on, Dave. The incident was nothing more than an impetus to write something on my mind. What I didn’t realize at the time, though, was the absolute and complete damaging effect mentioning certain names would have on the preception of what I wrote.

This has left me frustrated, not because I care that much whether people or agree with me or not; but because I’m left feeling that people didn’t even bother to read what I had to say. They saw “Danah”, “Joi”, “Cory”, and “Marc” and that was the end of the story for them.

Now this morning, somehow what I wrote about has become mutated even further to not only an attack on Joi Ito and his group, but conferences as well. This has not pleased me. No siree, not pleased me at all.

It was in a bitchy frame of mind that I wondered over to Dave Rogers weblog this morning to read what Dave had to say. I found:

I’ve been sort of participating in a discussion over at Shelley’s Burningbird Weblog and Grill about community, one of my favorite topics. I say “sort of” participating, because mostly the things I write just seem to vanish into the ether. I did get a nice comment from Stavros the Wonder Chicken, and Shelley even quoted large sections of my comments. But nobody ever bothers to stop and tell me I’m full of shit, which would at least suggest somebody read what I wrote.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

But it does matter, Dave. Especially when you gave me a pretty good idea of why I got hit by a 2 x 4 last night:

Anyway, I’m starting to get all pedantic again. Most of the discussions about “echo chambers” and “group-think” and “community” are carried on within a very narrow set of beliefs which have been cherry-picked to make us feel as good about ourselves as possible, even if they don’t adequately describe the phenomenon they’re trying to address. As long as we can feel “good,” whether that’s advocating for “emergent democracy” or “smart mobs;” or railing against sexism, elitism, or whatever other “-ism” that has provoked a response, then we’re not going to be inclined to look much further into our own behavior, our own beliefs, our own reasoning. It is superfluous to the goal of maintaining an interior state of homeostasis – usually a feeling which can be described as “good” if only by noting its absence as in “I don’t feel comfortable with…” Or, “I’m offended by…” Which is ultimately why we do the things we do: Because it feels “good.” For the most part it works. But at the edges, it doesn’t, and more and more we’re finding ourselves living at the edge. And woe be unto he or she who challenges what makes us feel “good.” They will be made to feel “bad!”

Jeneane wrote a post this morning on this whole thing, but one sentence stood out because it was all in caps:

DO YOU HEAR ME?

Fuckin’ A, I do. Especially since that was the phrase echoing through my own mind as I tried to work through my frustrations today without a) deleting every last page of this weblog; or b) declaring war on Joi Ito, purely as a desperate declaration of independence; not because I have anything against Joi, but because I’ve been slapped with a brush and painted as such.

Excuse me, but you always write ‘red’.

I do not always write, ‘red’.

Yes you do. You’re dripping with ‘red’.

But that’s not me, that’s how I’m painted. I was painted ‘red’.

You’re just making excuses.

No! No! I’m actually more ‘blue’ than ‘red’.

Sure.

No! Really!

Then why are you dripping ‘red’?

I forgot to duck.

This whole thing reminded me so much of that song from the rock opera, Tommy. Remember the one? Sure you do:

See me.
Feel me.
Touch me.
Heal me.

Listening to you,
I get the music.
Gazing at you,
I get the heat.
Following you,
I climb the mountains.
I get excitement at your feet.

Right behind you,
I see the millions.
On you,
I see the glory.

From you,
I get opinions.
From you,
I get the story.

(Lovely version of Listening to you from Michael Cerveris web site)

Looking at these words one way, you see a lone figure demanding to be seen, to be heard.. But, looked at another way, you see a crowd, about to run over and crush the object of their affection. I love the conflict behind this song.

Listening to you, I hear the music.
Gazing at you, I get the heat.

Following you, I climb the mountains.
I get excitement at your feet.

Right behind you,
I see the millions.

          On you,
I see the glory.

From you,
I get opinions.

From you,
I get the story.

The mistake I made was not in my writing, or using certain peoples’ names or a specific incident as an example; it was to give into the sucking vortex that happened afterwards. People will read what they want to read and if they want to read ugliness into the words, that’s their head, that’s their problem. But once I snapped at the bait, then it became my problem.

It started with being a writer or being a community member, and it returns to wence it came. Or as BlogJazz wrote:

I get to do that here. Without benefit or restriction of audience. There are power-elites in every plane I move. I can’t be touched. I don’t register on their radar. While their gravity influences me, I am fully-powered and able to make my own path. I can’t be cast off since I wandered away long ago.

I’m not joining any battle, or any war, or even paying attention to any more of the bullshit. The reason for this post is to point out the words that Dave wrote and that Jeneane wrote and that BlogJazz wrote, and suggest that you go read them.

See them.

Hear them.

(…and did someone volunteer to have me re-design their weblog?)

Update

And geez, I almost forgot the Wonder chicken. You know if you don’t go see and hear him, he molts all over the server. It’s a mess.

Categories
Weblogging

One last post

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

On being a writer as compared to being a community member.

Elizabeth Lane Lawley wrote tonight:

Shelley wrote “If community causes you to alter your writing—not to say something you think should be said, or to write a certain way to get attention—then you are betraying yourself as a writer.” And in a comment to one of Shelley’s posts, stavrosthewonderchicken wrote “It’s not about community any more, if it ever was, for some of the more visible amongst us, I don’t think. Unless by community they are referring to the intersection of their legions of acolytes and their semi-closed network of peers – the same people that they hang out with at these silly conferences that people talk so much about.”

That just makes me angry. How dare either one of these people pass judgment on the sense of community or friendship that’s developed among the people they’re criticizing? I have watched Joi reach out and befriend so many people—very few of them among the digerati that seem to irk Shelley and her readers so. But they don’t bother to look closely enough to see any of that. They paint anyone who counts themselves part of this growing community of people with an interest in the sociology and technology underlying new technologies with the same brush. And in the process, they diminish all of our voices. I fully expect that I’ll be dismissed by them as simply another acolyte—and that the irony of that dismissal will be completely incomprehensible to them.

How dare I write something like, “If community causes you to alter your writing—not to say something you think should be said, or to write a certain way to get attention—then you are betraying yourself as a writer”?

Easily. By being a writer, and not worrying about members of the community making remarks such as this.

She also wrote:

Not interested in the research and projects presented at conferences like ETech, or AoIR, or Media Ecology? Fine. Every academic and professional field has people who find it a waste of time or an orgy of navel-gazing. But the level of venom and animosity being directed at people who I’ve seen to be welcoming and encouraging to so many newcomers, and whose circles are so clearly inclusionary, indicates to me that this isn’t disinterest. It’s resentment. It’s entitlement. It’s a reverse form of exclusion—if you’re part of “them” you’re not part of “us,” and we’re the only ones who really understand the medium.

Venom and animosity. Huh.

Liz thinks I’ll just dismiss her. She said, I fully expect that I�ll be dismissed by them as simply another acolyte�and that the irony of that dismissal will be completely incomprehensible to them.

She does me a disservice, both in this assumption and in the accusation of writing about this issue with ‘venom and animosity’. But this will be the last time that I suffer her accusations.

I am gratefully reminded of the truth of my own words, and they will serve as my response:

The best damn thing that can happen to many of us is being cut adrift by our communities.

Categories
Political

Rape of woman and other spoils of war

Sometimes when you’re going through Bloglines looking at the excerpts, it seems like so many variations on a common theme. But then you click to another and you’re faced with What Causes Rape? Anatomy of a Rape Culture and the shock is staggering.

Ampersand at Alas, a Blog wrote an essay on rape culture, giving, as opinion, three reasons why rape occurs:

  1. The Myth of Masculinity
  2. Low Regard of Women
  3. Sexuality is something possessed by women, given to (or taken) by men

When humanity first breathed war, rape followed on the exhalation.

In ancient times, women were taken by conquering soldiers as spoils of war, sometimes becoming the wives of the victors, whether they wanted this or not. In many ways the fate that met many of these women was no different than if their lands hadn’t been overrun, except that their fathers would have made the determination of which man would own them.

Up until the last century or so for most cultures women were literally considered property, so it’s not surprising that a winning army would take the horses, the gold, and the women, usually valued in that order. This fits with Ampersand’s assertion that rape is a result of women being seen as little value, except, of course, in those cases when women were of value – just like the horses and the gold.

There was an additional reason women were raped in war: to humiliate the men. However, rather than taking the women, they would be left, sometimes dead, sometimes alive, as soiled reminders of the men’s failure to succeed on the battlefield. Rather than sympathy from her family and friends, though, the woman would be driven out of her home in shame because she didn’t die rather than submit. Rape is seen as the fault of the woman, not the man.

However, humanity is more civilized today, isn’t it?

During World War II, Russian soldiers raped hundreds of thousands of women – I’ve even read esitmates of millions of women, some being their own country women freed from German camps. In China, an estimated 80,000 women were raped by Japanese soldiers during the war, which was bad enough but there was at least some familiarity with this type of rape – the women were victims of wartime behavior. However, the Japanese government also, calmly condoned the concept of jugan ianfu or comfort women – women from many different countries but primarily Korean, kidnapped and or sold to the Japanese military to provide sex for the soldiers.

Supposedly these women were paid a small sum for each man they had sex with; I’ve read that they received 2 yen per man. Also supposedly after 500 or so men, they could buy their way to freedom. These women, many in their early teens, had to service so many men that sometimes they would fall sleep while the men were still using them.

Of course, the details were hushed up and the few photographs of the practice in the time showed Geisha-like girls winking at the camera, or signs showing:

`We welcome with our hearts and bodies the brave soldiers of Japan.’

US soldiers don’t escape the stigma of rape. The worst forms of rape can occur during civil war, and our own Civil War was rife with assault and abuse of women. As for modern times, you don’t have to look too far back to find an example in Tailhook, but even in Iraq, female soldiers not only have to duck bullets and bombs, they have to duck their comrades in arms.

But this is all war, and we know that in war behavior changes. Or at least, that’s what I’ve been told. But what about rape in a peaceful society?

Rape is used to punish women who go against the norms of society. “She’s a slut”, the kid says on the streets of Bloomington, as if this is all the justification that’s necessary. Even now with high profile cases, the rape victim is treated as if it were her behavior that led to the rape, rather than the lack of control, or even interest in control, of the man.

In other countries, rape is used to enforce religious dictates. “She’s immodest,”, the kids say in Baghdad, as they kidnap 13 year old girls and gang rape them until they’re half dead. But this type of rape isn’t to punish the women as much as it is to punish the men. It sends a message: control your women or we’ll ruin their value to you.

Rape is also crime of poverty. This weekend, Jane Fonda and Sally Fields helped to publicize the mass rape, torture, and murder of young women in Juarez, Mexico, most of whom worked at maquiladoras, or border factories. Rather than go after the real criminals, most likely organized crime, the authorities are instead going after bus drivers and farmers, too poor to defend themselves.

While I find Fonda’s ‘vagina warrier’ rhetoric and decision to produce and star in the play “Vagina Monologues” to be inappropriate to the event, I can still appreciate what they’ve done. Unfortunately, though, the balloons will soon pop, the pink paint fade. Where will Fonda be tomorrow?

But let’s focus on the more personal forms of rape. Ampersand talks about rape as a way of men asserting their masculinity, but I’m not sure if that’s a reason for rape. Rape in schools or in frat houses seems to me to be more pack behavior than assertion of male dominance. Men have raped as a group, where they won’t rape as an individual.

I do agree with Ampersand’s belief that rape is at least partially based on viewing women as an object of gratification. And you don’t have to look further than something like the hip Fleshbot to see women treated as objects: nude women as art, women pictured in cartoons being raped, women in bonds, women as nothing more than vagina, ass, mouth, and breasts.

Fleshbot may represent the mainstreaming of porn, but oddly enough, there is no clear correlation between pornography and rape. In fact, I found a fascinating study that shows there may be more of a correlation between a magazine like Field & Stream and rape. In other words, between a heavily masculine environment and rape.

Rather than rape being a reaffirmation of masculinity, masculinity becomes a affirmation of rape.

Still, what about rape porn. Feministe wrote about rape pornography, and whether this can desensitize the act of rape. In her view, if there is no acceptable forms of rape, then there should be no acceptable form of rape pornography (sharing the same view on child pornography).

Ampersand lists as one reason that men rape is that women have sexuality and men want it – rape for pleasure. According to an FBI Study of serial rapists, though, most did not experience any significant pleasure from the act. In fact, many of the rapists were dysfunctional during the act.

However, I believe that Ampersand may be focusing more on so-called date rape with his essay. And with date rape, all the rules about serial rapists or wartime rape goes out the door. Except for one common point shared by all, which I’ll get to in a moment.

The date rapist takes advantage of circumstances, such as the victim being incompacitated. Usually the rapist is himself drunk or stoned on drugs. In addition, date rapists are aggressive in other interactions with the woman, and tend to see women more as sexual conquests and objects of gratification; even more so than the serial rapists.

Acquaintance rape is the most common rape in this country, and in most other countries. It is also the one least prosecuted and most tolerated by society; more likely to be blamed on the victim than any other form of rape – leaving the woman to be victimized twice: once by the rape, and the second time by society.

In fact, that is the common shared aspect of all rapes – a belief that if only the victim had changed their behavior (dressed differently, behaved differently, not stayed poor, not joined the military, fought back) the rape wouldn’t have happened.

Rape is the only crime where the victim is held partially, or wholly, accountable.

Categories
Weblogging

Second star on the right

This is my last posting related to community member or writer, because if I’m a writer than I should be writing about something other than community. Or at least, I think I should be writing about something other than community, because I’m getting that feeling about this topic that tells me to move on.

(Or perhaps it’s the flu. You, and you know who you are, did you send me the flu through the wires? I demand words in recompense.)

However, a conversation did start that opened a new angle on the discussion, and I wanted to point it out, if for no other reason than it crosses weblog borders, without knowing it has done so.

Joi Ito did respond to Community Member or Writer post with Communities and Echo Chambers. He presumes a question on my part:

Shelly asks the question “What part of you, the writer, is part of a community? Where, within yourself, does community leave off and you begin?” and says, “But I guess we’re accountable to each other, and that’s the most dangerous censorship of all – it’s the censorship of the commons.” This is an interesting question that Shelley has pointed out to me and I have been thinking about. In the comments on Shelley’s blog, Doc ties it to the notion of the “echo chamber,” the effect where we’re all just talking to each other oblivious to the outside world.

In some ways this reminds me of the six blind men and the elephant, each describing the same thing, but the descriptions drastically vary because of their differening perceptions. One feels the trunk and describes the elephant as snakelike; another holds the legs, and describes the elephant as like a tree.

But Joi also wrote:

I think the key is to understand that it’s not just like a high school. In high school, there is group of friends and everyone spends all of their time concerned about being in that group or not in that group. My life is a jumble of relationships and memberships in a great variety of sometimes conflicting communities of all different sizes and doesn’t feel like high school to me. As Ross has pointed out, these can be roughly grouped into three sizes. Big power-law shaped groupings, which are political, medium sized groupings which are social, and smaller groups which are strong-tie/family/close-friend groups. My sister used the word, “Full-Time Intimate Community”.

The behavior at each of these levels is quite different and it is when we collapse the context that we get in trouble. Comments made between intimate friends are different from the comments that are suitable for a discussion at a cocktail party. Comments made at a cocktail party are often not suitable for a public speech. One of the problems we have on blogs is that all three of these contexts are often collapsed into one blog.

Dave Rogers, wrote on this theme in response to a comment by Joi:

I’d like to point out a few things as well. Given that your comments about Marc’s behavior being tasteless are _not_ going to change his behavior, then why offer them? There is a reason. What is it? It is in the nature of community, and the relationships between members of the community, and the beliefs that bind communities together. I submit you did not offer the comments to change Marc’s behavior, but to exploit Marc’s behavior to strengthen your own relationships within the community and to convey to other members of the community what the norms of belief are within “the community.” (A frustratingly difficult to define, if nevertheless very real entity. Complicated by the fact that there are communities within communities and communities of communities. It’s so, so…emergent!)

So Marc’s tasteless behavior is not allowed to go unremarked because it represents an opportunity for those who would presume to be authorities within a community to identify and proscribe types of behavior which are presumably outside the norms of the community. Joi strengthens his relationship within the community to Danah, presumably because at some point a stronger relationship with Danah will support Joi’s claim to authority within the community.

This was also picked up by Warren Ellis in Joi’s comments:

If the person(s) we’re addressing is sitting across from us in a bar, we don’t necessarily immediately shut up. What we do is moderate our tone. Or possibly not, if we’re trying to get through to someone. … It doesn’t stop you saying what you want to say. It just necessitates you put it in human terms.

Basic social skill tests go like this: your friendly acquaintance Fred Z has for some reason shown you a photo of a crack whore being anally raped with a corncob. Do you a) privately tell him he’s a weird little bastard and you’d rather he didn’t get within a meter of you again or, b) put the picture in the window and stand next to it pointing at it and saying “this really is appalling!”

You can substitute b) with “Blog it”, obviously.

In another related comment on this theme, Dave Rogers also wrote:

These (“push-back”) are observations, assertions and arguments that counter the observations, assertions and arguments of the conventional authorities. The effect, when the two camps are in balance, is to allow a community to give enough “space” to community members to allow the numbers and kinds of social interactions that define a successful community. Absent that balancing force, the force of authority shrinks the space of “acceptable” behaviors until they become so small that other social forces, likely the psychological forces of individual members’ needs, causes the members to abandon the community and, in effect, “fly apart” in a kind of psycho-social nova. Alternatively, if the force of authority is so strong and compelling, we get a very closed community that is not what we would call a “healthy” community. This might be analogous to a neutron start – itself often the product of a nova where most of the stellar mass is blown off in a violent explosion, leaving only a dense, presumably inert core.

My point, if I have one, is that much of what we do as people is the product of evolutionary psychology that has made us especially fit to affiliate in groups, and that much of our behavior is unconsciously designed to serve the needs of groups. When the values of the group are congruent with the needs of individuals, and there are always differences and therefore tensions, communities probably remain healthy. That’s not to say that individual members of communities necessarily treat each other as humanely as we would like to believe we do.

In this context, it was “safe” for Danah to assert that Marc’s invitation was offensive in a public forum. She had a somewhat reasonable argument to offer, and can be relied upon to be something of an authority on that particular issue. Her message was not to Marc, it was to “the community,” and it was intended to help proscribe certain forms of expression. If Danah was merely unhappy with Marc, she, as well as any of the people who offered their short, quick, effortless validations of her sanction, could have simply written an e-mail to Marc and expressed her feelings regarding the invitation. But that’s not what occurred.

Dave also mentions the concept of ’smart mobs’, saying:

This, in part, is why I have little faith in “smart mobs,” and regard the very notion as somewhat frightening. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a “smart” mob, we just have mobs that can act more quickly, more ruthlessly and less humanely than the already ugly things do in “meat-space.” Whatever hope we have of exploiting the technology of digital information networks to the betterment of our social interactions will only be realized by an attendant, thorough insight into our own nature.

Lago also writes about this in a related post, stating emphatically:

Excluding people and reinforcing local hegemony may be part of the �emergent� natural order, but the bulk of that behavior is still morally impoverished. Claiming �emergence� as justification for such behavior is irresponsible and cowardly, and it is especially so when used as a rhetorical device to claim that people who are excluded are responsible for their own exclusion because that�s how it goes in �nature.� Listen up, because I�m going to put it in a cute little quotable quote to increase the chances that readers will remember it.

Lynch mobs are just as emergent as smart mobs.

And he references Stavros in my comments who writes:

Not to insult the intelligence or the writing of any of my recent high-profile targets (all of whom, in contrast to times past when I sucked up to them, have responded with resounding silence to my shit-disturbing (but do I give a flying fuck? nah, not really…)), all of whom are also talented and capable to varying degrees, of course. But it seems to me that many are becoming famous for *being famous*, in true, hideously American fashion, and these folks, showing up at conferences and so on, the usual suspects in the usual line-up, begin to set up a cycle of feedback where the actual weblog, the actual writing (which this is supposedly all about, right?) becomes less the focus of the whole thing than the writer and his (or her, rarely) paid-for opinions.

It’s not about community any more, if it ever was, for some of the more visible amongst us, I don’t think. Unless by community they are referring to the intersection of their legions of acolytes and their semi-closed network of peers – the same people that they hang out with at these silly conferences that people talk so much about.

Reading all of this I am struck by a revelation (literally hit over the head with it by Dave): that my personal epiphany about wanting to return to being first and foremost a writer, without the weight of expectation from the community is neither that personal, nor that much of an epiphany. That if I hadn’t written a post on this subject, someone else would have (or already has).

Could it possibly be that the very voices for social software and emergent democracy and new forms of Internet communities and ’smart mobs’ are the very people destroying the foundation underneath them; spinning so tightly about the topic that we’re being forced into pulling away by the sheer mass of the support?

Dave used an analogy to astrophysics to discuss online communties:

I think an analogy from astrophysics may be in order, although I’m a little rusty on my stellar mechanics. Let’s say a “healthy” (i.e. vibrant, successful) community is a star. There are two forces at work in the star (there are more than two, but bear with me), the force of gravity, which keeps the mass of fuel together to support sustaining the fusion reactions that make a star as star (analogous to the psychological forces that compel us to affiliate in groups and the shared belief systems that make those groups possible), and the interior radiation pressure generated as a result of those fusion reactions that prevent the mass of stellar fuel from collapsing in on itself yielding a violent explosion in the form of a nova, or completely collapsing into a black hole, a singularity, a gravity well so deep that nothing, not even hope can escape. (That’s not exactly true either, but I like it as a turn of phrase, and it does say something about the nature of oppressive communities.)

Following from Dave’s analogy, is the social software phenomena, and its associated emergent democracy, ready to implode under its own weight?

I don’t know about the phenomena, by I just imploded under the discussion.

What say for cure for what ails me: tea and lemonade? or whisky and lemonade? Or a good walk in the fresh air?

(Or, as my friend Head Lemur gleefully points out, in our shared longtime joke – It’s all about me.)