Temat: Rene Girard i społeczności on-line

Witam,

Pracuję właśnie nad tekstem o zastosowaniu teorii mimetycznej do zrozumienia konfliktów w społecznościach on-line. Moja główna teza jest taka, że społeczności on-line są w wielu aspektach bardzo podobne do społeczności pierwotnych i użycie teorii Rene Girarda pozwoliłoby na wyjaśnienie dlaczego współpraca on-line jest taka trudna.

Jestem zupełnym amatorem w temacie antropologii, jednak zależy mi żeby ten tekst był jak najlepszy - więc umieszczam go tutaj z nadzieją na konstruktywną krytykę.

Pozdr.
Zbyszek

I am sure every reader of this blog knows well the "community cycle" - the way online communities get started, they thrive with peaceful, civil conversations, helpful strangers and kind atmosphere, and later how suddenly some innocent misunderstandings grow into flamewars, people stop listening to each other and only want to win the fight. And then some other community is started. It is sad to observe that pattern repeating over and over again and it is also intriguing how it can happen so repetitively when everyone involved knows how it ends. Why does that happen?

According to [url=http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Girard]René Girard[/url] this cycle of peace and conflict is not something special to the online world - it is the basic dynamic of human communities. I am not an anthropologist - but it strikes me how his descriptions of 'mimetic conflict' fit the reality of online flamewars (or ForestFire or many other modes of online strife).

Whether the violence is physical or verbal, an interval of time passes between each blow. And each blow is delivered in the hope that it will bring the duel or dialogue to an end, constitute the coup de grâce or final word. The recipient of the blow is thrown momentarily off bal­ance and needs time to pull himself together, to prepare a suitable reply. During this interval his adversary may well believe that the decisive blow has indeed been struck. Victory—or rather, the act of - violence that permits no response—thus oscillates between the com­batants, without either managing to lay final claim to it. Only an act of collective expulsion can bring this oscillation to a halt and cast violence outside the community.

In a way flamewars could be viewed as a modern stichomythia.
Our brains seem to react in the same way for a physical violence and one wholly comprised of text. The conflict that follows is not different from all the fights for social status described in history and literature, but on-line communities are so new that we have not yet distilled the right counter-measures. Off-line we do many things, even unconsciously, that mitigate the conflict or tunnel it into less harmful forms. In a way online we are like the primitive societies that only start with introducing counter-measures. But we are also different in being exposed to new forms of the conflict like trolling which can be well explained by the contagious nature of violence - but is a phenomenon unknown to the ancients.

According to the theory the first counter-measure discovered was finding a scape goat, a common enemy that unifies the community - this might explain the popularity of the vi-emacs wars. This solution worked for most of the history of our species - but I hope I don't need to explain that it is somehow unacceptable for our civilized point of view. It is also not very effective online - because the solution is never as ultimate as in off-line circumstances, it is not possible to silence people on the internet even if they are banned from the community spaces they will easily find another outlet for their voice, and everything is one click away on the internet.

After that black picture have been painted I need to add some moderation - yes at the core this is probably the deadliest and the most profound problem of whole humanity and it haven't been really solved and probably can never be solved for good. We cannot have much hope that we'll solve it online, but at least people don't yet kill each other online, the worst can happen is that someone get banned from some on-line community, this is hardly end of world, on the Internet there is another community just one click away. Our on-line communities might be more vulnerable to mimetic conflicts - but on the other hand there is no comparison between an on-line mimetic crisis and an off-line one, even thought we tend to treat them with the same mental response - this is what we have in our repertoir.

Online conflicts are not deadly as off-line ones can be - but still they are annoying, wasteful and cause community splits and in effect the fragmentation so well known in the Open Source world so reduction of their number and intensity is a noble goal. What practical advice can we deduce from the mimesis theory? I am not sure yet - but I've got some intuitions.

Perhaps the most obvious is reject comparison, refuse to enter the competition for the best text editor, solution for a problem, programming code. This is my interpretation of TIMTOWTDI. Comparing code, argumenting about the best solution etc. is practically never done in void - it is always about why my solution is better than your solution - and that can so easily start the mimetic circle of attacks and counter-attacks. Once we understand where the power of TIMTOWTDI comes from we can formulate similar advice like trying not to link ideas to people so that they can be debated without the social balast - but that can be difficult.

Yet another advice can be to borrow from science and law which are very effective in stopping the escalation of violence in contemporary societies. That means agreing on some objective measures (like for example speed benchmarks) and then carefully evaluating software according to those measures. Or constitutionalizing the communities (like the [url=
http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution]Debian project[/url]). Effectiveness of these measures depends how much authority can be transferred into the benchmarks/laws, but functioning of our own society relies very much upon similar structures so we can be pretty confident about them.

A characteristic thing about flame wars is how seriously participants seem to take them, no matter how trivial the object of contention is we seem to fall into the pit of boiling drama. I am not talking here about other people - I know it so well on my own example how seriously it all seems when you are in the diabolic circle. This also well resonates with the mimetic theory which says that the object of the mimetic rivalry loses it's significance over the course of the conflict, often it is destroyed - but this does not end the rivalry which becomes self-sustaining at some point.


As the sacrifi­cial conflict increases in intensity, so too does the violence. It is no longer the intrinsic value of the object that inspires the struggle; rather, it is the violence itself that bestows value on the objects, which are only pretexts for a conflict. From this point on it is violence that calls the tune.


This characteristic seriousness suggests another way to cope with the conflict - use humour it can destroy the layers of drama and let us see our positions more objectively. I am convinced by my experience that this is a very effective way of restating the problem in a less personal way - but I have not yet encountered any theoretical analysis of humour and mimetism.


At the very height of the crisis violence becomes simultaneously the instrument, object, and all-inclu­sive subject of desire.


Finally perhaps the most important thing is not to make violence the object of desire. This can easily become the case when administrators of common resources are abusing their powers to show-off or vent their anger by 'baning' people off them. Sometimes this can work in attracting new followers, who imagine themselves being the violent ruler, but it ultimately leads to a double bind situation and threatens the future evolution of the community.

All quotes above are from "Violence and the sacred" by Rene Girard and can be verified at at it's google books page.Zbigniew Łukasiak edytował(a) ten post dnia 02.10.09 o godzinie 16:37