Few words

~zampano

Well, they let me in the door, at least skeumorphically (putting my box by the bar). I'd make a poor mascot, though, so hopefully no one mistakes my role here.

Perhaps it's better to say that I hope no one thinks I *have* a role here, beyond what everyone else does, which is to read and/or write. If someone likes what I write, or I like what I read, so much the better. But there's something to small communities in and of themselves that can't only be explained by Dunbar's number. So it is that web communities are always a bit of a paradox: they need a certain critical mass to avoid devolving into predictable cycles, but if they grow too big they lose a sense of community. Maybe the pub metaphor that m15o chose is the ideal one: you can have the other regulars that you know, plus other people that come and go as part of the background.

Internet communities have other complications. I'm not especially persuaded by the idea of "internet as echo chamber," since it's no more so than any other part of the world. After all, we only have our own heads most of the time, and it doesn't get more echoing than that (at least mine certainly doesn't). On the contrary, there's far more information and perspectives at our fingertips than at any point in history if we should seek it out. If we don't, then we wouldn't have before the internet came along. Separating signal from noise is much harder, since everyone has a transmitter now. This is doubly so if you share my distrust of institutional thinking.

I do think online interactions can create a degree of hyperopia--we feel connected to a larger part of the world than we really are, and thus dramatically over-estimate the influence of the characters, in both senses of the word, that we put out there. The politically active I know have mostly been blunted by a focus on "takes" online over action, and on group in-fighting that rapid communication makes that much easier. Why bother working with someone you slightly disagree with when you have a few hundred Twitter followers explicitly or implicitly telling you you're always right? When it's so easy to tell someone off and block them so you don't have to actually *do* anything?

There's no grand conspiracy here, it's just what happens when something gets too easy. The internet and whatever platforms that are on it are simply tools. A tool's purpose is to make something simpler and/or easier, which in turn reduces its value. Tools are also ethically neutral, and making something easier can just as easily be powerful as it can be detrimental. As I've mentioned, we (meaning people) just haven't figured out how to do as much with it.

But to be clear, not every interaction has to be part of some grand crusade, and in fact that would be the worst possible world. My fears about interactions being increasingly attenuated are more that they distract us from what's immediately in front of us. I'm more and more convinced that small-scale changes are what really matter, and that a few good interactions immediately around us are worth more than all the advocacy campaigns in the world.

Maybe our relationship with words really is to reveal what's going on inside. At the least, we have much thicker barriers against words by and large thanks to the non-stop bombardment of advertising (political and economic) we're subjected to every day. Is anyone really convinced that some corporation is "sorry to see you go" when you unsubscribe from their mailing list? The business entity is incapable of such a feeling, and it's naive to think that the web developer who set up that message means it any more than the marketing executive who ordered it does.

Interactions between individuals can be guilty of this too. The formulae we're expected to throw each other's way can rapidly become ritualized, at which point they too mean nothing. We recognize messages that have no heart behind them. Better to remain silent than create some false heart that words can come from. There's enough poison in the air as it is.