Posts about comments

What Makes a Community?

January 17, 2018 by Jeff Jarvis
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Facebook wants to build community. Ditto media. Me, too.

But I fear we are all defining and measuring community too shallowly and transiently. Community is not conversation — though that is a key metric Facebook will use to measure its success. Neither is community built on content: gathering around it, paying attention to it, linking to it, or talking about it — that is how media brands are measuring engagement. Conversation and content are tools or byproducts of real community.

Community means connecting people intimately and over time to share interests, worldviews, concerns, needs, values, empathy, and action. Facebook now says it wants to “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people.” I think that should be meaningful, lasting, and trusting interactions among people, plural. Think of community not as a cocktail party (or drunken online brawl) where friends and strangers idly chat. Instead, think of community a club one chooses to join, the sorts of clubs that society has been losing since my parents’ generation grew old. Meetuphas been trying to rebuild them. So should we all.

What if instead of just enabling people to share and talk about something — content — Facebook created the means for people to organize a modern, digital Rotary Club of concerned citizens who want to improve their circumstances for neighbors, geographic or virtual? Or it provides pews and pulpits where people can flock as congregations of shared belief. Or it opens the basement in that house of worship where addicts come to share their stories and needs. Or it creates the tools for a community of mutual support to reach out and lift each other up. Or it makes a classroom where people come to share knowledge and skills. Or it creates the means to build a craft union or guild for professionals to share and negotiate standards for quality. Or it builds the tools for citizens to join together in a positive social movement…. And what if journalism served these communities by informing their conversations and actions, by reflecting their desires, by answering their information needs, by convening them into dialogue, by helping to resolve instead of inflame conflict?

That is community. That is belonging. That is what Facebook and media should be enabling. I’ll reprise my definition of journalism from the other day as the imperative Facebook and news share:

Convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.

How can we convene communities if we don’t really know what they are, if we are satisfied with mere conversation — yada, yada, yada — as a weak proxy for community?

While doing research for another project on the state of the mass, I recently read the 1959 book by sociologist William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, and reread Raymond Williams’ 1958 book, Culture & Society. I found lessons for both Facebook and media in their definitions of connected community vs. anonymous mass.

Kornhauser worries that “there is a paucity of independent groups” [read: communities] to protect people “from manipulation and mobilization.” In a proper pluralist and diverse society, he argues, “the population is unavailable [for such manipulation] in that people possess multiple commitments to diverse and autonomous groups.” To communities. “When people are divorced from their communites and work, they are free to reunite in new ways.” They are feed for trolls and totalitarians.

Thus we find ourselves working under a false definition of community — accepting any connection, any conversation, any link as qualification — and we end up with something that looks like a mob or a mass: singular, thin, and gross. “The mass man substitutes an undifferentiated image of himself for an individualized one,” Kornhauser says; “he answers the perennial question of ‘Who am I?’ with the formula ‘I am like everyone else.’” He continues:

The autonomous man respects himself as an individual, experiencing himself as the bearer of his own power and having the capacity to determine his life and to affect the lives of his fellows…. Non-pluralist society lacks the diversity of social worlds to nurture and sustain independent persons…. [I]n pluralist society there are alternative loyalties (sanctuaries) which do not place the noncomformist outside the social pale.

In other words, when you cannot find a community to identify with, you are anonymously lumped in with — or lump yourself in with — the mob or the mass. But when you find and join with other people with whom you share affinity, you have the opportunity to express your individuality. That is the lovely paradox of community: real community supports the individual through joining while the mass robs of us of our individuality by default. The internet, I still believe, is built so we can both express our individuality and join with other individuals in communities. That is why I value sharing and connection.

And that is why I have urged Facebook — and media — to find the means to introduce us to each other, to make strangers less strange, to rob the trolls and totalitarians of the power of the Other. How? By creating safe spaces where people can reveal themselves and find fellows; by creating homes for true communities; and by connecting them.

That is what might get us out of this mess of Trumpian, Putinistic, fascistic, racist, misogynistic, exclusionary hate and fear and rule by the mob. There’s nothing easy in that task for platforms or for journalists. But for God’s sake, we must try.

Now you might say that what is good for the goose is good for the nazi: that the same tools that are used to build my hip, digital Rotary Club can be used by the white supremicists to organize their riot in Charlottesville or advertise their noxious views to the vulnerable. Technology is neutral, eh? Perhaps, but society is not. Society judges by negotiating and setting standards and norms. A healthy society or platform or media or brand should never tolerate, distribute, or pay for the nazi and his hate. This means that Facebook — like Google and like the media — will need to give up the pretense of neutrality in the face of manipulation and hate. They must work to bring communities together and respect the diverse individuals in them.

“An atomized society invites the totalitarian movement,” Kornhauser warns. In mass society, the individual who does not conform to the group is the cuck; in totalitarian society, he is a criminal. In pluralist, open, and tolerant society, the individual who does not conform to someone else’s definition of the whole is free to find his or her community and self. That is the connected net society we must help build. Or as Kornhauser puts it, in terms we can understand today: “A pluralist society supports a liberal democracy, whereas a mass society supports a populist democracy.” Trump and his one-third base are built on populism, while the two-thirds majority (not “the mass”) of the nation disapproves. But our platforms and our media are not built to support that majority. They pay attention to Trump’s base because mass media is built for the mass and conflict and platforms are built as if all connections are the same.

In the end, Kornhauser is optimistic, as am I. “[T]hese conditions of modern life carry with them both the heightened possibility of social alienation andenhanced opportunities for the creation of new forms of association.” We can use Facebook, Twitter, et al to snap and snark at each other or to find ourselves in others and join together. The platforms and media can and should help us — but the choice, once offered, is ours to take.

I’ll end with these words of sociologist Raymond Williams:

If our purpose is art, education, the giving of information or opinion, our interpretation will be in terms of the rational and interested being. If, on the other hand, our purpose is manipulation — the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, know, in certain ways — the convenient formula will be that of the masses….

To rid oneself of the illusion of the objective existence of ‘the masses’, and to move towards a more actual and more active conception of human beings and relationships, is in fact to realize a new freedom.

After comments

April 21, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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Here’s my talk to Jeff Pulver’s 140Conf today on comments and interactivity, in which I argue that comments are an insult because they come only after media think they’re done creating a product, which they then allow the public to react to.

I defended comments on news sites for many years. But I think we have to move past them to true collaboration, which is more respectful and productive. There is no easy solution for civility, not identity or rating systems.

By coincidence, this appears at the same time that the New York Times publishes a story about the problems with comments, in which I suggest to the author — whose interview with me inspired my post — is often a matter of expectations: When we look at the internet as a medium, we expect it to look like media: packaged and clean. But when we realize that the internet is a place, like New York, then it’s less shocking to hear some bozo on a corner muttering “shit.”

The problem with comments isn’t them

March 23, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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I’m coming to think that the — or a — problem with the quality of conversation in comments online is a matter of timing:

Once we in media are finished with our work we allow the public to comment. We throw our product over the wall and let people react while we retreat into the castle and shut the gates so we cannot hear them. They know they are talking to bricks and so they shout and cover them with spray paint. Only we have the power to clean the mess but we’ve left the scene and so the castle walls are soon overrun with graffiti.

This timing — which is inherently insulting to the public — comes out of our old media worldview brought to the internet. We think the internet is a medium and that we make products for it that the public consumes.

When instead we open up to conversation earlier in our process then the conversation can become more collaborative and productive: We ask people what they know, which is a mark of respect and value. We listen to advice and requests. We end our separation from the public and join it. Waiting until we are done to listen is too late.

We must stop looking at the internet as a medium. I spent a long time this weekend talking with a reporter who’s writing about nasty comments — I’ll link to her piece when she publishes it — and I tried to convince her that the media-view we from media impose on the internet is much of the problem: When we see the internet as a medium, we expect it to be packaged and pretty, clean and controlled like newspapers and magazines and shows, and so when someone dumps a turd on that — a nasty comment — we think the whole thing is ruined, as if bad editing allowed “shit” to get into a letter printed in The New York Times.

But as Doc Searls taught me early on, the internet is not a medium — indeed, judging it as a medium brings all sorts of dangerous presumptions about control and ownership and regulation. No, Doc says, the internet is a place. It’s a park or a streetcorner where people pass and meet, talk and argue, where they are right and wrong, where they connect with each other and information and actions. It’s a public place. (And when I talk about publicness

Now judge the conversation in those terms: If you pass someone cursing on the streets of New York do you write off the place? Well, I don’t (especially because that person you pass might be me).

But all this is not to say that I accept, or we should accept the level of discourse on the internet as it is. No, I’m coming to believe that comments — which I defended when I ran sites — are an inferior form of conversation for the reasons I’ve just outlined. That’s easier to see because we’ve seen superior forms, like Twitter.

Twitter, like Facebook, is build mostly on real identities and control of relationships. I decide whom to follow and you decide whether to follow me. It’s an individual meritocracy in which each of us defines merit.

Back in the day — and still today — we hear that anonymity is the problem and that identity will solve that. That has never been the case. Identity alone isn’t enough. I may know the identity of that curser on the streets of New York but that doesn’t stop me from hearing him rant. Social controls are also needed so I can walk around him. That’s what Twitter and Facebook provide each of us. The result is better discourse. I don’t find Twitter or Facebook littered with fools and nastiness and when I do stumble upon them, I unfollow; when they occasionally spit on me, I block (if only I could instead give them their meds).

Somewhere in there is a secret to improving discourse online. Craig Newmark is talking about the need for distributed trust networks and in Twitter and Facebook I do, indeed, think we’re beginning to see the outlines of them. Clay Shirky wishes for algorithmic authority. Identity is a factor, of course. But we need to be careful about thinking that there is some system that will just clean up messy talk. That doesn’t work in life; it won’t work on the internet, which is life. What Craig and Clay are asking for is tools to help each of us have a more pleasant stroll in the streets of the internet.

But I also think we need to turn this question around and not look at the commenters but at ourselves as members of the conversation. What are we doing to improve the quality of discourse? So I return to that question of timing: When we open up and grant respect and talk with people eye-to-eye and collaborate, that creates value not just blather. In What Would Google Do? I told the story of MyStarbucksIdea.com as a platform for collaboration over conversation:

Some threads emerged from the suggestions and discussion. Many customers wanted express lines for brewed-coffee orders so they could avoid waiting behind alleged coffee aficionados with their half-this, half-that, skinny, three-pump, no-foam, Frappuwhatevers. Some customers asked to be allowed to send in their orders via iPhone. And some customers suggested—and thousands more agreed—that the chain should enable them to program their regular order into their Starbucks card so they could swipe it as they enter, placing the order and paying for it at the same time, letting them skip the cash-register line. One more proposed a pour-it-yourself corner and another asked for a delivery service. The theme—that is, the problem for Starbucks—was clear: long, slow, inefficient, irritating lines. But not one of these customers started with that complaint. Instead, they offered solutions to fix the problem. All Starbucks had to do was ask.

Should comments as a form of conversation be eliminated? No, of course not. The tool isn’t the problem (any more than blogging tools or printing presses are). If you eliminate comments that’s even more insulting than not listening to them and it risks giving up the incredible value the public can give if only they are enabled to (a value I saw so clearly in the comments under my posts here or here). The issue isn’t comments or identity or registration or tools. The issue is how you play host.