An interesting week...

I'm horrible at this stuff, but there have been a number of recent conversations about community and culture that strike me as worth noting, for several reasons... And in the aggregate, it seems like there's a new upswell in genuine interest in and understanding of what community management means, and how online community culture functions.

So the first conversation is this one at Terra Nova:  http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/04/the_magic_circl.html#more , which started as a discussion of the "Magic Circle" description of the virtual world experience, and shifted into a definition of a much more dynamic understanding of online culture, as more a thing of process that is really seamless with default world culture... that to try to differentiate mostly obscures the very important way that online experiences are, in the view of the participants, the same kind of thing as all the rest of their experiences.  We don't differentiate between a triumph at work, say, and achieving something tough online, they "feel" the same.  When we make friends with someone online, that relationship is very real, and grows increasingly indistinguishable from default world relationships that have online components. And yes, there are clear differences, but the point is that "synthetic" experiences can have an impact on us that is identical to "default" ones.  And culture that's engaged in, online, impacts, informs, and clarifies our cultural experiences in general.  We learn from these experiences in meaningful ways - even, or especially, in emergent and "deviant" behavior.

Which is the point of Lisa Galarneau's awesome post, also at Terra Nova: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/05/is_it_really_so.html#more which I think is basically talking about how part of what happens, especially with griefing or other socially "unacceptable" (in some sense) behavior is experimental social experimentation and potentially even learning behavior.  In this sense, experience in synthetic worlds is valuable to us as a chance to "play" with elements of our lives in contexts where there are reduced consequences.  I'd even go further and suggest that that's the motivation, to a large extent:  it's the ability to experiment, learn, and even grow as a result of these experiences that makes them appealing. 

The next post I want to point out is actually on Slashdot - where there was a post pointing to some writing on community management by Sanya Weathers (long-time DAOC community manager, who's just restarted her blog "Eating Bees"  http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/).  The posts are fun, and when I get a minute I'll link to her blog, but the interesting thing to me is that this is regarded as noteworthy to the Slashdot community.  Bit of visibility there that's new, I think.

And the last post is again Terra Nova (and look for some more substantive posts here in the next few days, and we're hoping to wrangle some guest posts also - it's really not time to stop reading here and just hang out at Terra Nova) - this a post today on some of the community behavior in LOTRO - very much a cultural perspective.  I'm thinking I will post something soon along these lines... I've been thinking of it for a while, and I have a slightly different perspective (and I want to understand the "structuration" theoretical underpinning in the post).  The TN post is here: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/

The aggregate of all this, imho, is a premonition of a surge of awareness of community management... both as a profession, but also as well understood as a set of social interactions with deep connections to the rest of our personal and social lives, and to the academic work that's been done to understand them.

Comments

[Celia Pearce]

Wow Ron this is about three posts thrown into one.

I tried to comment on TerraNova on your first link but Typead kacked so hopefuly it will work on my own blog!

I've been critiquing some of the Magic Circle rhetoric for some time. I don't belive the Magic Circle is as sanctified as some researchers believe. My researh with the Uru Diaspora showed it to be much more porous. In my chapter for "Second Person" (MIT 2006, Wardrip-Fruin & Harrigan, Eds.) I talk about "trans-ludic" identities that move from game to game. I also note how the fact that people are playing on a PC, which is used for other activities, predisposes computer games in particular to more Magic Circle bleed-through.

You've also written about ARGs and Big Games and here we see a deliberate ambiguity in the Magic Circle, in which we see a blurring of the boundary by design. I think exploring and perhaps even messing around with this boundary is really interesting. I'm working on a new project, which I'll post about later, that is very much about this.

[Taelos Katran]

I watch in wonder at why people continue to doubt that any relationship between humans is not in all ways "real". Why does this deserve so much study? After all, does everyone not understand that behind EVERY player avatar is a real live person? Someone with real live emotions, needs, desires? Why is the "online" world any different from what we have experience before for thousands of years?

People can, do, and have been forming relationships in many ways other than face to face. And they are very real, not pretend or play. Here is one famous example for you to consider.

In 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson asking him to be her friend and her advisor.

That spring, she had read an article that Higginson had published in the Atlantic Monthly, offering advice to young writers. He challenged them to try to capture the world they lived in with all of its ordinary detail.

At that point in her life, most of the people Emily Dickinson had been close to, outside of her family, had either moved away or died. She wrote to Higginson that her only companions were the hills, the sundown, and her dog. Higginson wrote back to her that maybe what she needed was a friend. She wrote back in a letter to Higginson and said, "Would you have time to be the 'friend' you should think I need. I have a little shape: it would not crowd your desk, nor make much racket as the mouse that dents your galleries."

Dickinson scholars think that she had some kind of romantic attachment to Higginson. There is evidence that she tried to conceal her correspondence with him. And after the first letter she sent, she mailed all the additional letters to him from outside of Amherst.

They kept up their correspondence for the rest of her life. She eventually stopped asking for his advice about her poetry. He visited her in 1870, and when he arrived at the door, he said, "She came to me with two daylilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand and said, 'These are my introduction.'

Higginson found it exhausting to visit Emily Dickinson. He wrote to his wife, "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much."

....

How is Emily's relationship with Higginson as described here any different from that formed between avatars in an MMOG? I see no difference.

In my experience as an avatar I too have formed many relationships with others in world. And they all are very real, not because of the MMOG, not because of the artists, or the in world avatar representation, but because of the human who is behind each avatar.

I am Taelos Katran an avatar, come visit me and I will be your friend too.