Communities of virtue

“The recent terrorist events were not committed by any community”

So says a leaflet just issued by London’s Metropolitan Police as part of their Communities Together program.

What struck me immediately about this were the implicitly normative assumptions suddenly being loaded into the idea of Community.

Are communities intrinsically virtuous? Why can’t bombers be a community too?

The public policy agenda seems to be to conflate certain groups of people who self identify as a community with virtue in order to resist the demonisation of these groups – which is all well and good.

But is it intellectually sound? To me community is simply a term that descriptively bounds a group of people - some notion of positive ethical out look might be one of those, but it's certainly not a necessary one, racists and paedophiles are very communal I believe.

When we talk about the social aspects of MMOs do we have the rose tinted glasses on? Are we just creating the opportunity for griefing communities, new forms of social exclusion, sites for organised *.phobias?

Or is this just not our concern – social responsibility can only go so far, right?

Comments

[Vili Lehdonvirta]

1.

While I'm not sure which particular definition of "community" is implied here, there's definitely a whole "scene" of grief players associated with Habbo Hotel. Here's a typical example of a griefer group:

http://bc-mafia.tripod.com/

Not only do they harass outsiders, but also engage in "grief wars" against other griefer groups and their allies.

Sounds worrying, but to me it looks similar to how boys used to bully each other (and pull the girls' hair) on the school yard, except I guess the Internet makes the playfield larger. We know that most Habbo players are between 10 and 19 years old.

On the other hand, the Habbo community in general seems to have no trouble demonising these "krews" and "mafias".

[Raph]

2.

Not to be too morally relativist, but in the broad sweep of history, "bad" communities often become "nice" ones. This was an observation that was crystal clear during the PK days of UO--the most sociologically complex guilds were often territorially aggressive PK guilds that settled down and had begun to develop beyond simple PK raids. A lot of cultures started out as the equivalent, and as they scaled, developed sensibilities that we consider nicer.

The irony being that early on, the nice guys seem to tend to lose. Premature civilization may be a non-survival characteristic in a PK environment. :)

[Urizenus Sklar]

3.

Obviouly the leaflet was talking about "community" writ large -- as in "the UK muslim community" or some such thing. I suppose there could be a "bomber community", or a "community" of people living in one flat, but it stands to reason that the leaflet wasn't talking about that kind of community. As to the idea that communitites (writ large) are intrinsically virtuous, I don't see how we can extract that from the leaflet either. All the leaflet says is that "the recent bombings" were not committed by some community writ large. Am I missing something?

[genericdefect]

4.

I tend to think the pamphlet's meaning is limited to defining the actions of the militants as being conducted on behalf of insufficiently credentialed political bodies rather than an agency against which a sovereign, self-credentialed institution could retaliate legally. (i.e. substate actors)

As to xenophobic or Aristotelian communities forming within virtual worlds, and then competing with one another.. then yes, I think one can expect that. Groups can even become exclusive on the premise of essentially objective reasons. F.ex.: "Our virtual city/cult compound can't afford to supply another guardian."

The nature of completely liberalized spaces is that developers tend to need to make the individual completely autonomous oeconomically. This tends to lead to simulated anomie. You can let players have shared, objective terms of success, but that doesn't lead to a MMonline community. Rather, it just leads to a MMonline distraction.

Alternately, you can develop a simulated monoculture, but players aren't going to cleave to it unless it is a product of majoritarianism or a tyranny of the demos. It'd probably be rather entertaining actually.

[ren reynolds]

5.

Urizenus Sklar > Obviouly the leaflet was talking about "community" writ large

genericdefect > I tend to think the pamphlet's meaning is limited to defining the actions of the militants as being conducted on behalf of insufficiently credentialed political bodies rather than an agency against which a sovereign, self-credentialed institution could retaliate legally. (i.e. substate actors)

Indeed.
I noted that I -got- the public policy agenda underlying the wording. I was taking a literal rather than contextual view of the wording as it seemed to shed light on an implicit assumption that community builders might have.

In the original draft I was going to mention organisational learning. When I wrote about this some time ago it seemed to me that the literature and practice on the subject assumed that (a) organisations were things that could learn, (b) that there were things that one could do to facilitate that learning (c) that the organisation would learn things that were in its benefit. Whereas some studies seemed to suggest that organizations can be seen as learning things but they have a tendency to lean the wrong lessons from exceptional events e.g. a project that goes wrong might tell an organisation not to persue a given market although other projects in the same area might have been a success.

Hence, exposing the hidden normativity was useful in this case as it meant that additional practices could be put in place that attempted to ensure that beneficial things were learnt.

Hence in social software and MMOs, I was wondering whether developers need to have a mind to the kind of communities that they are facilitating both in respect of in-world activity and extra-world activity.

Are game chat logs scanned for ‘bomb’, ‘kill bush’ that sort of thing? Should they be?