[NEC] TEST #2

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NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Neworks, Economics and Culture 

         Published periodically / # 1.1 / March 16, 2002

In this issue ===================================================

- Essay: COMMUNITIES, AUDIENCES, AND SCALE
  (Also available at http://www.shirky.com/community_scale.html)
- Things worth reading
- Questions I am asking myself

Essay ===========================================================

COMMUNITIES, AUDIENCES, AND SCALE

Prior to the internet, the difference between community and audience
was largely enforced by media -- telephones were good for communal
conversation but bad for reaching large numbers quickly, while TV had
the inverse set of characteristics. The internet bridged that divide,
by providing a foundation for both communities and audiences. Tools
like email can be used for either two-way or one-way mailing
lists, usenet newsgroups can support either group conversation or the
broadcast of common documents (e.g. *.announce, *.answers), and so on.
Most recently the rise of software for "The Writable Web", principally
weblogs, is adding two-way features to the Web's largely one-way
publishing model.

With such software, the obvious question is "Can we get the best of
both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large
audience, but also allows the members of that audience to engage with
one another like a commuity?" The answer seems to be "No."

Communities are different than audiences in human (which is to say
fundamental) ways, not merely techological (which is to say surface)
ways. You cannot simply transform an audience into a community with
technology, because they assume very different relationships between
the sender and reciever of messages.

Though both are held together in some way by communication, an
audience is typified by an I-thou relationship between sender and
reciever, and by the disconnection of its members from one another --
a one-to-many pattern. In a community, by contrast, people typically
send _and_ receive messages, and the members of a community are
connected to one another, not just to some central outlet -- a
many-to-many pattern[1]. The extreme positions for the two patterns
might be represented as a centerless and completely interconnected
group, vs a broadcast star where all the interaction is one-way from
center to edge.

As a result of these differences, communities have strong upper limits
on size, while audiences can grow arbitrarily large. Put another way,
the larger a group held together by communication grows, the more it
must become like an audience -- largely disconnected and held together
by communication travelling from center to edge -- because increasing
the number of people in a group necessarily weakens communal
connection. The characteristics we associate with mass media are in
many ways effect rather than cause -- mass alone is enough to turn a
community into an audience, regardless of the media involved.

- Community Topology

This barrier to community growth is caused by the intersection of
human social limits with the math of large groups: As group size
grows, the number of connections required between people in the group
exceeds human capacity. 

A community's members are interconnected, and a community in its
extreme position is a "complete" network, where every connection that
can be made is made. (Bob knows Carol, Ted, and Alice; Carol knows
Bob, Ted, and Alice; and so on.) Dense interconnection is obviously
the source of a community's value, but it also creates coordination
costs as the group grows: you can't join a community without entering
into some sort of mutual relationship with at least some of its
members.

For a new member to connect to an existing group in a complete fashion
requires as many two-way connections as there are group members, so
joining a community with 5 members is much simpler than joining a
community with 50 members. This in turn creates a tradeoff between
size and the ease of adding new members. The usual solution, adopted
any time new members join a large group, is to establish mutual
conections with a subset of the existing members, but this simply
shifts the problem from the number of conections each user must make
to the ratio of actual to potential connections. This problem is made
even worse by the fact that to understand the dynamics of a group, an
individual member needs to understand the relationships between other
group members as well. [2]

As group size grows past any individual's ability to maintain
connections to all members of a group, that ratio shrinks, and as the
group grows very large (>10,000) the number of actual connections
drops to less than 1% of the potential connections, even if each
member of the group knows dozens of other members. Thus growth in size
alone alters the fabric of connection that makes a community work.
(Anyone who has seen the userbase of a usenet newsgroup, mailing list,
or bulletin board grow quickly is familiar with this phenomenon.)

An audience, by contrast, has a very sparse set of connections and no
mutuality between members. Thus an audience has no coordination costs
associated with growth. Each new member of an audience creates only
one new connection, and not even a mutual one -- you need to know
Yahoo's address to join the Yahoo audience, but neither Yahoo nor any
of its other users need to know anything about you. The disconnected
quality of an audience that makes it possible for them to grow much
(_much_) larger than a connected community can.

- The Emergence of Audiences in Two-way Media

Prior to the internet, the I-thou quality of mass media could be
ascribed to technical limits -- TV had a one-way relationship to its
audience because TV was a one-way medium. The growth of two-way media,
however, shows that the audience pattern re-establishes itself in one
way or another -- large mailing lists become read-only, users of sites
like slashdot see fewer of their posts accepted[3], online communities
(eg. LambdaMOO, WELL, ECHO) eventually see their members agitate to
stem the tide of newcomers.

If real group engagement is limited to groups numbering in the
hundreds or even the thousands[4], then the asymmetry and
disconnection that characterizes an audience will automatically appear
as a group of people grows in size, as many-to-many becomes
few-to-many and most of the communication is from center to edge, not
edge to center or edge to edge. Furthermore, the larger the group, the
more significant this asymmetry and disconnection will become: any
mailing list or weblog with 10,000 readers will be very sparsely
connected, no matter how it is organized. (This sparse organization of
the larger group can of course encompass smaller, more densely
clustered communities.)

- More Is Different

Meanwhile, there are 500 million people on the net, and the population
is still growing. Anyone who wants to reach even ten thousand of
those people will not know most of them, nor will most of them know
one another. The community model is good for spreading messages
through a relatively small and tight knit group, but bad for reaching
a large and dispersed group, because the tradeoff between size and
connectedness dampens message spread well below the numbers that can
be addressed as an audience. 

It's significant that the only two examples we have of truly massive
community spread of messages on the internet -- email hoaxes and
Outlook viruses -- rely on disabling the users' disinclination to
forward widely, either by a social or technological trick. When
something like All Your Base or OddTodd bursts on the scene, the
moment of its arrival comes not when it spreads laterally from
community to community, but when that lateral spread attracts the
attention of a media outlet.[5]

No matter what the technology, large groups are different than small
groups, because they create pressures against community organization
that can't be trivially overcome. This is a pattern we have seen
often, with mailing lists, BBSes, MUDs, usenet, and most recently with
weblogs, the majority of which reach small and tightly knit groups,
while a handful reach audiences numbering in the tens or even hundreds
of thousands (e.g. andrewsullivan.com.)

The inability of a single engaged community to grow past a certain
size, irrespective of the technology, will mean that over time,
barriers to community scale will cause a separation between media
outlets that embrace the community model and stay small, and those
that move towards the publishing model in order to accomodate growth.

Though it is tempting to think that we can undo the asymmetry and
disconnection of mass media with new technology, the difficulty of
reaching a millions or even tens of thousands of people one community
at a time is as much about human wiring as it is about network
wiring. No matter how community minded a media outlet is, needing to
reach a large group of people creates asymmetry and disconnection
among that group -- turns them into an audience, in other words -- and
there is no easy technological fix for that problem.

========= Footnotes to COMMUNITIES, AUDIENCES, AND SCALE =========

[1] Defining community as a communicating group risks circularity by
ignoring other, more passive uses of the term, as with "the community
of retirees." Though there are several valid definitions of community
that point to shared but latent characteristics, there is really no
other word that describes a group of people actively engaged in some
shared conversation or task, and alternatives like 'engaged
communicative group' are more narrowly accurate, but fail to capture
the way that communal feeling arises out of such engagement. For this
analysis, community is used as a term of art to refer to groups whose
members actively communicate with one another. [<A HREF="#Graf1">Return.</A>]

[2] The total number of possible connections in a group grows
exponentially, because each member of an N member group must connect
to every other one of N-1 members. If Carol knowing Ted and Ted
knowing Carol count as two connections, there are N * (N -1) possible
connections, which is the same as N ** 2 - N. If Carol and Ted knowing
one another count as a single relationship, there are half as many
relationships as connections, so the relevant number is (N ** 2) - N/2.  

Because these numbers grow exponentially, every 10-fold increase
in group size creates a 100-fold increase in possible connections; a
group of 10 has 90 possible connections and 45 possible two-way
relationships, a group of 100 has 9900 connections, 1000 has 999,000
possible connections, and so on. The number of potential connections
in a group passes a billion as group size grows past 30,000. 

[3] Slashdot is suffering from one of the common effects of community
growth -- the uprising of users objecting to the control the editors
exert over the site. Much of the commentary on this issue, both at
slashdot and on similar sites such as kuro5hin, revolves around the
twin themes of understanding that the owners and operators of slashdot
can do whatever they like with the site, coupled with a surprisingly
emotional sense of betrayal that the community control, in the form of
moderation. (More at kuro5hin,
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/1/17/21155/1564, 
and slashdot,
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26315&cid=2850660.

[4] In _Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language_ (ISBN
0674363361), the primatologist Robin Dunbar argues that humans are
only adapted for social group sizes of around 150 or less, a size that
shows up in a number of traditional societies, as well as in present
day groups such as the Hutterite religious communities. 

[5] In _The Tipping Point_ (ISBN 0316346624), Malcolm Gladwell
detailed the surprising spread of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid the
'90s, from their adoption by a group of cool kids in the East Village
to a national phenomenon.  The breakout moment came when Hush Puppies
were adopted by fashion designers, with one designer going so far as
to place a 25 foot inflatable Hush Puppy mascot on the roof of his
boutique in LA. The cool kids got the attention of the fashion
designers, but it was the fashion designers who got the attention of
the world. 

Things Worth Reading  =============================================

- Duncan Watts work on Milgram's "Small Worlds/6 Degrees of Separation"
experiments:

  His book: _Small Worlds_, 1999, ISBN 0691005419

  His re-creation of the Milgram experiment:
    http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/index.html

  Evidence that the Milgram experiment was more anomolous than it first
  appeared to be:
    http://smallworld.sociology.columbia.edu/history.html

- Interesting speculation about slashdot's further transformation into
a more traditional news outlet, with the libel laws as a possible
spur.  
  http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=28874&cid=3100604

Questions I Am Asking Myself  =====================================

Why did Usenet die? 

In 1994, usenet was such a significant tool for group conversation
that we had to explain to journalists that usenet was not the only
thing on the internet. Less than a decade later, its essentially dead,
killed by spam and disinterest. What combination of factors led to its
death, and what does that say for creating community software?

End ===============================================================

Copyright 2002, Clay Shirky

Feel free to reprint, quote, or forward, so long as you credit me and
provide a link to http://www.shirky.com that accompanies the material.