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3. juli 2003
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Technology and people meet, head on!
Clay Shirky writes about groups and software, and explains why a group is its own worst enemy. He makes some very interesting and important points you should know about if you ever intend to be part of a social system that exists on the Net (if you are a blogger, you probably are).
Why are large online communities so problematic? Because through all hundreds of thousands of years mankind has existed, there was nothing like it. Even phone conversations had their precursors in normal talking. Broadcasting worked like a man standing on a stage. But hundreds of people talking to hundreds of people has never existed before very, very recently.
Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.
We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.
He explains a lot about the problems and pitfalls, echoing pretty well my own experiences with online communities (which is extensive, if not like his!).
Shirky also has a word of warning to anyone running or owning collaborative online systems (like message boards or mailing lists):
The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you'll hear about it very quickly.
That's part of the problem that the John Hegel theory of community -- community leads to content, which leads to commerce -- never worked. Because lo and behold, no matter who came onto the Clairol chat boards, they sometimes wanted to talk about things that weren't Clairol products.
"But we paid for this! This is the Clairol site!" Doesn't matter. The users are there for one another. They may be there on hardware and software paid for by you, but the users are there for one another.
The patterns here, I am suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design for, are givens.
It doesn't matter that somebody doesn't like it. It is.
11:22:27 PM 
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Bloggers get libel protection
The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that bloggers, along with site operators and mailing list admins can't be held responsible for libel for information that they republish. Bloggers thus have a higher level of protection than newspapers..
"One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward."
Ironically, it is the provisions of the much hated Communications Decency Act of 1996 that is behind this decision. It states that providers are not responsible for messages they simply forward. The responsibility thus lies with whoever originally stated something.
So what we write ourselves, we will still be held responsible for. I have no problems with that.
10:17:29 PM
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Recommended site about flood
Glenn Morton was kind enough to tell me that his brilliant website about Creation-Evolution and Noah's Flood has moved to a new location. I had referenced him in my article Does Genesis teach a local flood?
Glenn is a Christian and a geophysicist, and he's been appaled at the misuse of science and ignorance about basic facts so typical of young earth creationists. He has over the years written a significant number of high quality articles about the subjects, which is very much worth reading for anyone with an interest in origins. He is also the authot of two books on the subject, advertised on the page.
9:00:36 PM
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Disturbing dream
I knew it had to happen at some point. This morning I woke up after an uncharacteristically vivid and mildly realistic dream about blogging. I don't remember much about it, except it did include googling around for material. That was the mildly realistic part.
12:41:50 PM
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Where dysfunctional, rich parents can lock up their troubled teenagers
I just read an extremely troubling article about Tranquility Bay, a Jamaican private youth prison housing around 250 teenagers, mostly American, sent there by their dysfunctional rich parents to be tortured, indictrinated, humiliated and in the end broken so they can be sent home to be respectful for their parents.
The establishment doesn't even accept really problematic kids; the parents who send their children here are often divorcees, complaining of normal problems of adolescence and going ballistic because their young ones dated the wrong guy, tried pot, hung around the 'wrong' type of friends.
The result can be that they are kidnapped, with parental blessing, brought to this prison hell and have to spend the next years under extreme supervision until their personality is broken and they accept the doctrines of the camp leadership.
Points and privileges are awarded to students who tell on each other. If you don't tell on someone for breaking a rule and get found out, you lose points. 'There is zero trust,' Scott explains. 'You can't trust anyone. It's not us against them. It's everyone against you.' Scott remembers a new boy being caught with incriminating used tissues; masturbation is strictly forbidden. 'And they got him up in front of everyone right after dinner, and the upper-level kids just ripped into him, this little 13-year-old kid. It was kind of the entertainment for the night. That's what I mean about breaking kids.'
And, yes, it's perfectly legal, at least on corrupt Jamaica and in the US, where parental choice is sacrosanct. The USA is, along with Somalia, the only country who has not signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would prohibit "all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment" of children by their parents or guardians.
There is a discussion about this article on Kyro5hin.
1:03:32 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.08.2003; 03:02:59.
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