To the Barricades

Malcolm Gladwell has a new article out in New Yorker called "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted". He examines Iran's "Twitter Revolution" and writes about why it was doomed to failure. The argument he makes is a simple one: people are motivated to make big changes and take big risks when a movement is a "strong tie" movement - when your friends or your family are in the movement. He uses as his example the desegregation sit-ins in the 1960s and writes that the group of black kids who first demanded service at a Southern diner that didn't serves blacks all had strong-group ties to each other - two pairs of best friends with three of them I believe going to the same high school. All of them were socially accountable to each other. "Come on, man, it's time to put up or shut up. You aren't going to chicken out, are you?"

Whereas with Twitter and Facebook, the acquaintanceships formed there are "weak tie" relationships. "Weak tie" relationships aren't by definition worse that "strong tie" ones - indeed, the power of casual acquaintanceship is truly astonishing and can do many things that strong-tie relationships can't. The problem is that you can only get so much out of casual acquaintanceship. Iranians aren't going to risk their lives at the barricades because you changed your avatar to a Twitter ribbon. Oh, on a message board you can get all sorts of useful advice that you could never get anywhere else, and have access to information far beyond any your strong-tie friends and family could provide - but the important thing to remember is that the advice you get is free advice which doesn't inconvenience the person giving it. If you were going to ask someone on PPMB to loan you $5000, you might get a different answer. That's the kind of thing you can only ask a friend or family member - with whom you have a "strong tie" relationship - to do.

Another point Gladwell makes is that with strong-tie relationships centralized authority starts to form. If four friends decide to do something, there's going to be a division of labor after a time. More than likely, one of these friends will become the unofficial leader. Now, try the same thing with 400 message board posters. All of them are acquaintances as best, with no strong ties and in some cases, no emotional investment. This is why forming organizations of any kind over the internet is very difficult.

All of the above appears to apply to what I've seen happen on message boards since the beginning of the internet age. For example, there's a big difference between people who I've met in person and people I've only met "on the internet" so to speak. With people you've met in person, you feel like you know them even though you really might not - I always have particular fondness for people I've met in person. Whereas with people I've never met in person, I can know tons of things about their lives and yet come away with the impression that I don't know them at all. The tie that's formed with actually meeting someone in person - even if it's a weak one - appears to top anything I've experienced on a message board. The pattern seems to go:

Message board/chat room
Private message/e-mail
Phone call
In-person meeting

As one goes down the list, the tie that's formed becomes more and more strong. I think that most internet message board disputes could be solved by an in-person meeting; most people wouldn't have the balls to say the obnoxious shit they say on the internet to someone's actual face. (Many of those who would say such things to someone might be the kind of people so sociopathic that they couldn't function in society - they call it having 'no impulse control'. These hair-triggers generally can't hold a job and are the epitome of the insult that they 'live in their mother's basement' since they couldn't function in the outside world well enough to do what it took to move away from home.)

There is also something to be said for strong organizational power. I think the reason the PPMB has stayed alive so long is that it has a form of strong moderation - people who show up strictly to cause trouble can be controlled or banned. With weak moderation, such social shunning depends on several people who would otherwise be acquaintances to act in unison; a nearly impossible act over the internet. People who don't like such moderation are free to congregate elsewhere although history has shown that they have never congregated in large groups - or when they have, the congregation could simply not maintain itself for very long.

This leads to talking about one of my favorite subjects: one of the laws of internet trolling. Draw two axes. Let the x-axis be the number of people in any on-line community. Let the y-axis be a function of x - namely, the probability that a group of size x could be successfully trolled for long periods of time.

The resulting graph is a bell-curve: groups of medium size are the ones most successfully trolled. For small groups, the ten guys who get together to talk about collecting stainless steel three-bladed boat propellers can get together in private chat and unanimously agree to ban some trollish newcomer. For large groups, the 1,000 people who meet every day to talk about the New York Yankees are just too big to troll - there would be far too many active threads in such a board to strike and moderators could the troll when caught with only a handful of the other 999 noticing or even caring. (Most would be calling for the troll's head; it's unlikely that one person's contributions would impact a group of that size significantly.)

All of this has to do with the power of weak vs.strong ties. All message boards are weak-tie groups. The small board's ties are weak, but small groups are more likely to come to a consensus even if they are only acquaintances. The large board's ties are also weak, but at some point in its history the group must have been able to develop moderators and a method of dispute resolution and punishment - or it never would have lived long enough to become a large board. It's the middle group, with weak ties and no consensus that is in the most danger. A troll might be able to pull together enough sympathizers to survive, which could never happen in a large group.

My question then is: did Daria fandom manage to solve its message board problems because the size of the fandom grew, or did it solve them because it shrank? And has Daria fandom truly escaped the dangerous middle ground?