Virtual democracy doesn't work in online community

NET RESULTS: The web is seen to provide a neutral meeting place where communities can form around common issues

IF YOU ran your own little fiefdom, what form of government would you choose? Would you prefer a democracy, an autocracy, a benign dictatorship perhaps?

The question isn’t entirely trivial, at least not if you run any kind of online community, ranging from an e-mail list to a discussion board to a virtual world. Choosing your personal mode of governance can make or break the community.

It also isn’t an easy decision and the answer may be less obvious than you might think. Most people in theory would choose a democracy or some variation thereof – and the internet has been touted as a kind of ideal spawning ground for participative democracy.

Not without its quirks and problems of course, but in general, the web is seen to provide a neutral meeting place where communities can form around common interests and issues and give everybody and anybody a chance to be heard.

Such an encouraging view (though assiduously taking into account many caveats and complexities as well) was outlined by Howard Rheingold in his seminal work The Virtual Community back in 1994.

The book, which can be freely accessed now online, was one of the very first to take a careful look at this emerging new online world and the people who were colonising it – and yes, it does end with a chapter titled Disinformacracy, which offers many cautions and considers a more sceptical view of where online communities might be heading.

Rheingold’s subheading for the book, Finding Connection in a Computerised World, pretty much sums up his angle. It is sobering to remember that when he published The Virtual Community, hardly anybody, in relative terms, was online.

In 1995, the first year for which I could find an estimate of the online population, analyst IDC estimated about 16 million people globally were using the internet, compared to at least one billion by late 2009 (according to comScore and Internet World Stats).

In the mid-1990s, you pretty much needed to be in academia, working for a national government or for a technology company to be online, or be geeky enough to have figured out a way to get connected. That meant those early internet communities were fairly exclusive.

By the end of that decade, though, internet service providers were everywhere and, as long as you had a computer, a phone line and a provider in your area, you could log on.

A billion plus is a lot of people online and you would expect communities to have evolved and changed with the influx. Actually, though, reading Rheingold now underlines how consistent the dynamics of online communities are – although today’s social networking communities have accelerated those dynamics.

If anything, the issue remains the difference between online and “real world” communities, the ways in which technologies themselves alter the community experience and influence or change behaviour.

Rheingold highlighted many of these dynamics, as did MIT academic Sherry Turkle in another pivotal book of the same era, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, published in 1995. They arise again in Communities in Cyberspace, a much-cited collection of academic essays by Marc Smith and Peter Kollock from 1999.

Clay Shirky dissects the topic in 2008 in Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organising Without Organisations. In short, plus ça change.

So, how to manage these gatherings of people? As Shirky notes, sometimes they self- organise, but at other times, someone has to set up and run the community, at least to some minimal degree that keeps the software functional and the spam postings to a minimum.

That’s when all the psychologies of the cybercommunity come to bear and the administrator is left to decide how heavy or light a touch to bring to community management.

Too little and the community is easily eaten away by spam, “trolls” who deliberately start arguments and, inevitably, the pushier personalities in the community who can easily veer towards downright intimidation and silencing of other community members.

Too much and the community feels censored and manipulated, not so much a community as a managed audience shaped to an agenda.

In short, the open democracy can turn into mob rule, while the autocracy strips the community of any sense of self.

I lean towards the benign dictatorship myself. It isn’t ideal, but it -keeps communities manageable if they are run in one’s spare time and not as a full-time occupation.

I have set up a few discussion boards and e-mail lists over time, and been a member, moderator and administrator of many others.

I find consistently that the totally unmanaged, democratic communities almost inevitably become deeply unpleasant except to those who are outspoken and truly enjoy a cut-and-thrust mode of interaction.

The totally managed ones turn into lifeless, numb places in which little creative thinking or discussion is allowed to take place.

The benign dictatorship – or perhaps better put, the managed democracy, where members have a clear sense of someone running the online premises and keeping an eye out for the more belligerent – tends to have the best chance of finding equilibrium and more than a short-term lifespan.

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