Snark and Stability
Nitsuh Abebe is one of the smartest guys on the Internet (my patch thereof). In this post he offers a defense - or at least the best explanation I’ve seen - of how snark became a default mode of online discourse.
This bit is really crucial I think (emphasis mine):
Flippancy is more fun. The work of reaching out and explaining things is potentially dull and time-wasting; it’s just plain funnier and more exciting and more gratifying to be on the inside of shared assumptions. (We like talking to friends, not strangers.) The histories of a lot of message boards and comments boxes can be traced out along these lines: they begin with a few people earnestly explaining themselves to one another, finding common assumptions and common ground and welcoming newcomers; then they grow, and their shared assumptions solidify, and they get flip and concise and referential and giggle at newcomers who stumble in and Have to Ask.
This is exactly right, and is what I was getting at in my conference paper a couple of years ago when I talked about the shift from “content motivation” to “social motivation” within communities (of course, Nitsuh and I are thinking primarily of the same community, so beware!).
At an individual level community is all about having interesting conversations and meeting new people and suchlike. But at a group level all those conversations and interactions create a complex system out of which emerges social convention and shared knowledge and the perhaps unpleasant glue of snark. And this happens pretty much beyond the level of one or two individuals to change (well, OK, I’m not sure I believe that, for reasons I’ll come on to).
Anyway, occasionally on social media blogs you get someone saying “LOL Twitter is all about what people had for lunch” and someone else then says “No LOL @YOU because we really need this phatic stuff and it’s good for us.” And snark is kind of like next level phatic communication - we’ve invented something which combines the two crucial primate group activities of picking shit out of each others fur AND chasing other apes off the territory. Good for us! (Seriously!)
You can tell I’ve been reading Herd recently, I’m sure.
Which book also reminded me of Philip Ball’s terrific Critical Mass, and the stuff he writes there about metastable states and their applicability to social behaviour. An example of a metastable state - forgive my rubbish layman’s explanation! - is when water stays liquid well below freezing point, until it gets disturbed, and collapses into its stable state (ice) all at once. What I took from Critical Mass is an appreciation not necessarily for the science of metastability but for the concept as a wonderful metaphor for fragile equilibria.
So what I wonder in relation to communities is - and here’s the research-relevant bit - what if generosity is a metastable state of online discourse? With snark being the stable state - the stronger equilibrium that generosity (by which I specifically mean - welcoming to newcomers) is likely to tip into as a community grows and creates its social glue.
If so this would have some interesting implications. One largely unexamined baseline assumption about communities among marketers is that they stabilise around generosity: with a certain amount of light moderation they are basically self-sustaining. But if generosity is metastable we’d expect its maintenance to require more and more effort as the community grows - with consequences for the cost and energy of running one.
