In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on February 18, 2009

I’ve been thinking about the effects of ‘net interactivity on perception and the formation of meaning systems for a long time now (about 20 years). A lot of this thinking has been focused on population level, structural changes that have taken place, i.e. a shift from redistributive communications systems to reciprocity based communications systems (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here).  Recently, I have been pushed back into thinking about the specifics of how such reciprocity based systems operate thanks, in part, to discussions with Max Forte and Matt Armstrong.   Max and I have been engaging on discussions about, amongst other things, rhetoric and logic, while Matt and I have been talking about Propaganda vs. Public Diplomacy.  Recently, Matt posted a link to an excellent blog post by John Matel entitled Public Diplomacy & New Technologies [PD&NT].  John makes several interesting points that I would like to extrapolate on.

‘Net 2.0 Tribes

Internet 2.0 will strengthen “tribes” as people can go online to find others with whom they identify even across great geographical distances.  (Of course, the tribes I am not talking about are not kinship of linage, but kinship of ideas.)  This may lead to greater trust within groups, as they become more uniform and homogeneous, but also lead to a general decline in tolerance overall, since most people will be out-groups to any particular in groups.   Early hopes that Internet would weave the world together in a kind of cyber age of Aquarius have been dashed against the reality of self-selection and segregation. [PD&NT]

The neo-tribalization phenomenon John is talking about has been observed for a number of years, now.  I won’t say that it was “inevitable”, but I will say that it was highly likely as the result of the convergence of a number of social trends.  Probably the most important set of these trends was the rapid dispersal of families in search of work – a diasporic trend where transportation and communications technologies were mismatched (i.e. you could travel more easily than you could communicate).  The ‘net 2.0 technologies flipped this transportation-communication imbalance such that communications is now easier than transportation, with predictable results (cf Innis’ The Bias of Communication).

First of all, why would people bother to take the time to meet and develop relationships with the random individuals they come in contact with as a result of geographic movement?  The short answer is that most of the time, we don’t bother – we will search out those who are “like minded” in some manner.  A couple classic examples of this: in the US, moving to a new city and joining the local church of the same denomination or, in Nigeria, moving to the city and joining a “community association” which is based around your tribal lineage.

Second, in geographical communities, it is very hard to access and develop personal networks that run counter to that communities version of “morality”.  This is not the case when you develop online and, possibly, anonymous, relationships globally.  This has certainly been the situation when we look at the development of online child pornography rings, for example, but it is equally the case for almost any “special interest”.

Evolutionary pressures on ‘net tribes

In a mass information market, differing viewpoints must be tolerated, not so in the case of core groups of believers autoerotically communicating among themselves on the Internet. Where websites and blogs are most developed, disagreements have become sharper and more venomous.   [PD&NT]

When I read this, it reminded me of the utility of evolutionary theory.  In particular, the neo-Darwinian, sparse evolutionary theory so ably described by Wm. Calvin in his The Six Essentials.  Calvin’s article should, in my opinion, be required reading in grade school.  It is not a difficult piece, but it is one of the cleanest and clearest expositions of a Darwinian process.

When we look at ‘net based neo-tribalism in Darwinian terms, certain points jump out at us.  Calvin’s model outlines six essential characteristics and five non-essential catalysts and stabilizers.  When we apply his model to ‘net tribalism, we get some interesting insights.

1. There must be a pattern involved.

What is the “pattern” in ‘net-based neo-tribes?  I would suggest that it is patterns of perception relating to interpretation of external events.  Or, in other words, units of “meaning” composed of perception selection, interpretive ascription, and predefined reactive actions (NB: this is loosely based on Andrew Abbott’s conceptualization of professional knowledge in The System of Professions).

2. The pattern must be copied somehow (indeed, that which is copied may serve to define the pattern).

For online communities, the “copying mechanism” is based on the underlying meta-epistemology (see here) of the community.  In really simple terms, a meta-epistemology defines processes that

1. define sensory input as “data”,
2. define rules for creating interpretive processes, and
3. define rules for constructing validity tests.

The crucial part, at least as far as being a copying mechanism is concerned, lies with the final point – defining rules for constructing validity tests.  So, for example, if you have a community that has an assumed rule for validity tests that states “X is always true” (i.e. axiomatic assumptions such as “Democracy is always the best form of Government”, “Islam is the only true religion”, “Man-Boy love is good”, etc.), then all patterns must pass that rule in order to be copied.

3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance — though it need not be purely random, as another process could well bias the directionality of the small sidesteps that result.

Many ‘net based neo-tribes are centered around communities of practice and/or communities of interest.  These communities, in turn, are focused on some form of interaction with the socio-cultural environment – sometimes local, sometimes global.  Variant patterns are often produced in this situation by changes in the environment that is being focused on.

4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space.

The term “work space” can be a touch misleading. Basically, it means an “environmental niche” complete with niche specific, limited resources.  For net-based neo-tribes, the work space is bounded by the membership (which is, in turn, bounded by connectivity requirements), and the “resource” being competed for is the time, attention, and acceptance of the members (all of which are subject to other pressures as well).  This is starkly different from geographically based communities where the boundary conditions are physical and, to a much greater degree, both non-voluntary and more tightly combined.

So, a pattern of meaning and a variant pattern will compete within this limited work space (the “community”) for limited resources of members time, attention and acceptance.

5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment: for example, how often the grass is watered, cut, fertilized, and frozen, giving one pattern more of the lawn than another.

While this should be obvious, based on the nature of the work space, there can be some rather startling, highly distributed, examples (see here for one).  Often, the specific work space of a community is a mere fraction of the work space of an individual member of that community, since most neo-tribes are non-exclusive, interest focused.  The “multi-faceted environment”, therefore, includes both the neo-tribe “community” as well as the individual members’ environment.

This is decidedly different from geographically based communities where the individual environment was much more tightly coupled with the geographic community.  This point is alluded to by Matel when he notes that

However, the impersonal/personalization of web interactions allows people with very divergent views to coexist and performs mutually beneficial transactions that would be impossible in a face-to-face world.

This is a crucial distinction that cannot be over-emphasized between “tribes” and “neo-tribes”: “tribes” tend to be “total organizations” (cf. William G. Ouchi, Theory Z) while neo-tribes tend to be specialized organizations.

6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns.

One of the more intriguing differences between net-based communities and geographic based communities is how “success” is measured.  This comes out of the fact that most net-based neo-tribes are loosely couplked rather than tightly-coupled, so we can’t really use the old “survive and procreate” model for “success”.  What we can do, however, is use that model for individuals within the community who adopt a variant and then proceed to spread that variant pattern of meaning.

If we define success as the spread (“acceptance” loosely speaking) of a pattern of meaning, then we can see that new variants will attempt to ride the coattails of successful variants which have already achieved acceptance.  In effect, it is easier to get something “accepted” or thought about if it is close to something that is already accepted.

The dangers of parcellation

One of the five catalysts and stabilizers mentioned by Calvin is that of “parcellation”.  For Calvin,

Parcellation (as when rising sea level converts the hilltops of one large island into an archipelago of small islands) typically speeds evolution. It raises the surface-to-volume ratio (or perimeter-to-area ratio) and exposes a higher percentage of the population to the marginal conditions on the margins.

One of the central features of ‘net-based neo-tribes is their specialization, their focus on a particular set of practices and/or interests.  At the population level, where the population is defined as the members of the particular neo-tribe, this creates a strong, but specialized focus.  Often, this focus gets brought up in discussions about comments, interactions, etc. that are “irrelevant” to the focus of the community (I’m basing this on 20 years of being a moderator of various groups and talking with other moderators).  This tends to establish a fairly strong, but small, perimeter for the community, making it susceptible to “groupthink“.

At the individual level, however, few of these neo-tribes acts to define a total meaning structure.  Increasingly, individuals will be members of multiple neo-tribes.  This multiple membership creates an extremely odd situation where parts of the individuals meaning structures are highly focused and defined (and subject to groupthink), while others may be quite amorphous, unfocused and not reflexively examined (cf H.H. Perlman Persona: Social Role and Personality for a base model).

One effect of this individual level differentiation (and diffusion) is to reduce the utility of speaking of neo-tribal “cultures” as a predictor of individual action.  When we talk about the “culture of X”, where X is a geographiclly defined group acting as a total organization (which is the type of group originally studied by Anthropologists), it is fairly easy to fall into the assumption that cultural structures are synonymous, or at least have a very strong relational mapping to, individual perceptual structures.  This is not the case with ‘net-based, neo-tribal “cultures”.  We can certainly examine the cultural structures of such a neo-tribe and extrapolate that to individual perceptual structures only when individuals are acting as a member of that neo-tribe.

Needless to say, that creates a very tricky situation when anyone tries to extrapolate individual behaviour based on neo-tribal affiliation.  Let me give a rather personal example of this.  I am a member of several neo-tribes including the Small Wars Council and Anthropology (okay, Anthropology, as a discipline, would more properly be referred to as a meso-tribe ).  One of the rules of validation of the SWC is that a) wars happen (they are inevitable) and b) if your country is involved in a war, you should help even if you disapprove of the causes of the war.  While this could be stereotyped as a “my country right or wrong“, it actually isn’t if you take the time to learn how it is interpreted and perceived (it is much more subtle than that).  At the same time, I am an Anthropologist which, as a tribe, tends to be very reluctant to have anything to do with warfare.  This can, as has been, stereotyped as “Leftist anti-war sentiment” but, as with the other stereotype mentioned, it is actually much more subtle and based on perceptions of historical probabilities.  Would anyone care to try and predict how I will react based solely on these two “tribal” memberships?

Now, that is a fairly simple example of the problem.  Shall we expand it out to something much more complex?  Shall we try and extrapolate how an individual will react if, for example, they are a member of a neo-tribe centered on the study of the essentials of Islam (or any other religion)?

One of the crucial dangers of the parcellation of neo-tribalism is the ease with which stereotypes are created as a result of such parcellation (they are an inevitable consequence of the development of strong peripheries, i.e. in-group vs. out group).  When this is combined with fragmented meaning structures that are, again, an inevitable outcome of the fact that individuals construct their own overarching structures, we end up with people using some of the most jarringly illogical rhetoric.  A good case in point comes from the reactions to the death of Paula Loyd which has been nicely analyzed by Max over at Open Anthropology.

Some concluding thoughts

I want to close this post off by making a couple of final observations.  First off, Anthropology has been plagued by the concept of “culture” as some amorphous, controlling “force” for over a century.  This had some utility when the vast majority of communities were geographically based and fairly “total”.  But the rather simplistic understanding of “culture” that has been popularized really does not capture the diverse and distributed reality of today.  This isn’t to say that Anthropologists all subscribe to such a simplistic version: we don’t and we haven’t historically, but it is the version, the stereotype if you will, that we have communicated outside of our own meso-tribe.  We, as a tribe, need to rethink both what and how we communicate of our understandings of culture.

Second, I believe that we as a species need to develop much better fora for communications between members of radically different neo-tribes.  In particular, I believe that the development of self-reflexive techniques are crucial since we are all subject to increasing parcellation pressures.  This, in my opinion, has some very significant implications for, amongst other things, universities.

Finally, and as an extrapolation of the development of self-reflexive techniques, I feel that we need to develop strong, trans-tribal, codes of “politeness”.  This does not mean that we “all agree” or any other such bunnies and light silliness.  We humans are often contradictory, ornery beings and attempts to make us otherwise are, quite simply, delusional.  When I am talking about codes of politeness, I am going back to my grandmothers’  definition of politeness as “the Vaseline of social intercourse”.

Category: CMC, Epistemology
Tags: Computer Mediated Communications, Evolutionary Theory, meta-epistemology, Neo-Tribalism