The internet is a strange and wonderful medium. We’ve all talked about it. Some would like to control it, some love it free.
The fact is that it will never be controlled. You can shut down a board, you can close a website, you can ban people from a particular site, if you have that limited control, but it doesn’t stop the free flow of voices. People will find a way to be heard.
For all the talk about the freedom on the net, there is still grumbling from those intimidated by freedom. Control is a funny thing, and sometimes paradoxical: the more you try to control the more out of control the situation gets.
To effect meaningful change you have to find the right leverage, and that is not always obvious. If a particular group on the internet proclaims their purpose is to share information and grow on the cutting edge of their profession, how is this accomplished?
Well, you could create a blog and encourage participation from interested professionals in that particular field of endeavor. But what happens when blogs become part professional discourse and part social networking, which is bound to happen? Do you allow it to evolve, or do you control the group to meet predetermined goals and outcomes?
To control the social networking part you have to create strict rules that govern content. Then you have to create punishments and rewards for non-compliance and compliance and you have to follow through. So, if someone is non-compliant, you have to follow through and punish the violator. Or, first you can try to reward the participants for compliance. If the predetermined goal is to keep content clean of extraneous social influences, then to achieve the desired result you must control the behavior of the participants.
This is a tall order when you don’t have real leverage – the more you push for control the more the system of participants push back. If you implement both forms of behavioral control, reward and punishment, you get a mixture of compliance and stubborn resistance. What you don’t get is wide-range commitment to the goals and results. Compliance is much weaker than commitment. The only leverage you wind up having is the ability to ban the ones who resist, settle for compliance and maybe garner a few who are committed to your course of action.
Diversity is usually sacrificed in this process so that the group you have remaining is homogenous. Anyone who has managed creative people will understand when I say that compliance is not their strongest suit. This usually results in a restriction of innovative ideas, too much technical/workshop talk, and a slow attrition of the group as even the faithful lose interest and look for something more sexy.
As online communities evolve, the strict definitions of forums will dissolve and human interaction will be more important than the structure. The successful online groups will be the ones that use the leverage of freedom to the fullest extent possible. The internet will be a scary place for control-freaks.
I will follow this up tomorrow with a blog on what I have learned about learning. If the true goal here is to learn, how do we best learn? What are we trying to learn? Is social networking a part of learning? Where’s the leverage?