…for a trivial, somewhat scurrilous experiment in participatory weblogging: I know there are community weblogs, such as MetaFilter, in which thousands of participants create what some would assert is a vibrant cross-fertilizing conversation, while others would say the signal-to-noise ratio just decays from the effort. FmH has an audience far smaller, by, oh, at least several orders of magnitude, who I know are demanding, reflective, erudite readers in breadth and depth. I have always been puzzled, and sometimes solicited feedback, about the fact that other weblogs log many more reader comments, even many more per capita. Unsuccessful, I am tired of trying to figure out why, with rare exceptionsm, it is not happening here. (Is the commenting system too cumbersome? am I cultivating passive consumers despite — or because of — my attempt to be provocative? deadening thought?). Most conversation among the likes of you would likely be breathtaking, so I am going to try to take direct action to goad you into it on at least a trial basis. Not that you have to work for your daily dose of FmH, but I would like to propose that, for the next week, everytime you come here you scroll down, pick one post about which you have something to say, and enter a comment, one thoughtful comment. A couple of extra clicks, thirty seconds’ more time on my page. Begin with a bias toward those posts that do not yet have any comments. Amplify, fertilize, contradict, dispute, synthesize, eviscerate, perseverate, tangentialize, analogize on anything here… Then, as your reflections accumulate, you will inevitably be riffing off the comments of others. You know, of course, you can do it anonymously, if that matters; just not contentlessly. Indulge me, think about it for a moment, you really have no good reason why you would not try this for a week.
Why do I want to do this? [Stop reading here if your bullshit meter is turned on, it probably won’t make a whole lot of sense.] Surely, it is not because I care about the cumulative total of the little numbers in the parentheses at the end of every post per se. I have been interested for a long while in transformative social processes and the power of small communities, you might say on a tribal scale, a participatory scale, how group process works, how organizations think. Information processing constraints place an upper bound on face-to-face interactional possibilities around one to several hundred members; the possibilities for consensus- and confidence-based ‘social contracts’ move into a symbolic and some would say unworkable sphere with larger social groupings. Now, don’t nitpick, I realize that the community of readers of FmH is in no sense like a tribal culture. This is not a participatory democracy; webspace-rooted avatar-to-avatar interactions are in important respects different from face-to-face; cultural ecological niche contingencies as a shared experience are replaced by — what instead? — in a web community. Most of you would recoil from considering that any sort of community at all is manifested or embodied by merely coming to the same webpage from time to time.
Yet there is a coincidence of size. The readership of FmH is around the same order of magnitude as allowed in tribal culture and far different than weblog-communities more on the scale of city-states, nation-states, republics, representative democracies… with different possibilities. I have been far less interested in growing the scale of my readership; something has suggested that what at first appeared to be an uncanny hindrance to growth to which I have had to accommodate might be seen as an opportunity instead. I have always been fascinated by the transitions from quantitatively to qualitatively different states in human interaction; what interactional density at a nexus of people of this size would precipitate a quantum leap or tipping point? If so, how deliberately can the push be made? I am willing to take this wherever it might go… which most likely will be nowhere, right? Comments?
