Well, here I am, better late than never imnsho. So what is it that has kept me up late into the night, banging my ears and screeching incoherently? No, it’s not Bush. Nope, not my assine job either although that runs a close second.

It’s community. This one in particular.

Whaaaa! you are now screaming NO! Not more meta community conversations!

To you I say bah. Or maybe, yeah, no doubt I’m sick of them too.

Either way, if you’ve gotten this far then you have more time on your hands than is reasonable or you really enjoy my quirky sense of humour. Probably both.

Now on to my wisdom and glorious insight….
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been very active in the pond recently. Most probably have not.

Actually, the majority of you are probably wondering who the hell this spiderleaf person is to presume to lecture them on community or botany… but I digress. Or do I.

[I have been around you know. Lurking. Reading. Hit and run sporadic postings…. just so we’re clear that I’m not just pretending to know who you are or anything.]

Man, I should probably just call this post digression ‘r us or something… hmmm. anyhoo.

So what’s with all the fuss about community and the notion we have to “keep it” or “protect it” or “it ain’t what it used to be”. Well, for the most part, I know most of the active posters here on the site. Or those who used to be active and have now gone elsewhere. But pretty much, that’s a small subset of the number of registered users on the site. Probably not more than 100 or so people out of 4k. Really small percentage all told.

Hell, I might even be able to list them all here from memory (no, don’t worry, I’m not that intoxicated to get that sidetracked). So what’s my point you ask?

Well, it’s this.

Communities are, as a rule, no larger than 150 people. There are scientific studies to back that up. Ask the Pentagon if you want (or maybe the nice data analyst reading this post would be kind enough to post a comment and validate my research)… the military purposefully limits battalions to 200. After that order tends to break down and people start bitching.

Why? Because you can’t really know more than 150 people and care about their opinions, or have a sense of their character, beliefs or humanity.

For a good primer on this theory I suggest “The Tipping Point” by Malcom Gladwell. I’ll quote a paragraph from the book to illustrate my point.

“The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship…”

Dunbar has combed through anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up again and again. For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea… and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. “Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men,” Dunbar writes….
It is still possible, of course, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regluations… But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally…

Then there is the example of the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years have lived in self-sufficient agricultural colonies in Europe and, since the early twentieth century, in North America. The Hutterites… have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one…. “When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another…

“What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan.”… “You get two or three groups within the larger group.”  

So what does that mean for our beloved Frog Pond? Not much really other than how we choose to label ourselves. (this would apply to ‘community’ blogs in general too) I tend to see blogs as a network of communities. Some with a small member base, in which case the community ‘elders’ set the tone and attract similar personality types, or those with complimentary skills or beliefs. Some with a larger community base, like dkos segment into cliques, or communities of like minded individuals who are in turn linked in to the broader network of cliques, or communities on the site. Quick test – how often do you find yourself giving the same group of people a ‘4’? Or responding to their comment? Or reading their diary (ahem, clique of spiderleaf is obviously immune from this test thank you very much).

Some of these cliques will clash with the others. All in all it’s much easier to police or deal with a conflict internally if you understand the perspective of the person you are interacting with. This is much more likely if it’s a person you’ve been chatting with in the Cafe everyday. Or hanging out in the Lounge with drinking your sorrows away… ummm… having meaningful conversations with.

You get what I’m saying.

We won’t all agree, even within our smaller communities. And the medium and technology makes this much more difficult to navigate. If I’ve never seen the twinkle in your eyes it’s much more likely I’m not picking up on it in your comment… unless we’ve interacted a lot in the past… and even then it’s not a guarantee.

We also have a unique thing going here whereas we’ve self-selected to join this community. I didn’t get an invite from a friend to go to a dinner party, start chatting with the social director of the group and the host and find myself invited back the next time. There really is no auditioning process for membership…. people either talk to you, or they don’t. Or maybe they do one day and not the other. Or maybe you don’t post at all and are really just eavesdropping on a conversation around the water cooler. In any case, the ‘group’ didn’t invite you in, you invited yourself in. And once you did, you brought your life history and experiences with you. And 9.5 times out of 10 it is not a history or experiences I share. I can relate to, sure, but we are not identical. We all didn’t go to UCLA and participate in Frosh week together. Or volunteer for the Sierra Club. Or have the same taste in music and literature. Nope, I have no idea where you’re coming from unless you tell me. And sometimes you’ll tell me something that to me, seems to come from left field and to you, was there all along.

See the problems inherent in this?

So, to make a long story short… and to continue on a theme I raised in catnip’s diary…

If we all stop worrying about making everyone ‘fit’ into our perception of what our community is and just realize we’re one big network, some of us closer to some more than others, and that we all have our own stuff going on… perhaps we can keep our smaller communities and continue to interact and learn from each other in the larger network that is BooMan Trib and the liberal blogosphere.

I know I don’t always agree with everyone, but I have stopped trying to make everyone fit into my ideal of the perfect liberal. Or human being. Because we are all fucked. And we all have horrible, painful, character changing and perception forming events in our past and present. And it would be exhausting for me to try and prepare my comments to make sure I don’t offend them all. I for one do not have the reverse gift of a DuctapeFatwa. So, if you get my goat, I may indeed get pissed off, I may tell you that I’m offended, and horribly so. But then I’ll walk away, go get some fresh air and realize that in the grand scheme of things that I don’t know you and you don’t know me. We’re just blips in the wide world of the internets. And if we can’t figure out how to have a conversation and not kill each other than I have no idea how I’m supposed to figure out how to hook the vcr up to the toaster…

Now onto the burning question… why did I write this now, when it’s not a hot topic in the community and I’m not likely to go shooting up the reco list while generating hundreds of comments? So that maybe, in a small way, if we think about things proactively rather than reactively, we don’t have to have those diaries up there and can talk about other stuff… well, one can hope can’t one? 😉

But enough about me, how you doin’?