A twitter conversation between me and (mostly) Prokofy Neva
paul: thinking: You are a product of the communities you inhabit
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet hell no, not me : )
garethj: @pjnet Communities are defined by the people that inhabit them
paul: @garethj communities self-perpetuate types of people
paul: @Prokofy those communities may require you to be belligerent and annoying to others in the community - it’s a “type”
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet does it make you feel innovative and clever to typecast people?
paul: @Prokofy - you’re arguing my point about communities in http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=189…
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I simply don’t believe in prescribing Social Darwinism for others, imagining up little deterministic scenarios for “communities”
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet most of the time, there isn’t even any such thing as a “community.”
paul: @Prokofy you are the kind of person that encourages people to find out about stuff
paul: @Prokofy not sure what you’re getting at - I think you’re confusing my thoughts with something else
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, I’m responding directly to your your tweets. You said people r defined by communities. I say, no, they aren’t & they don’t exist.
paul: @Prokofy communities don’t exist? People are defined by the communities they inhabit - it’s a choice which communities we join
paul: @Prokofy even an anarchist is part of a community no?
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no? I realize that’s just awfully clever, gosh, you are a product of what you rebel against but no, I’m not a social Darwinist they pretend that they create, empower, link, blah blah “communities”. They don’t. It’s a vast fiction -fake friends list isn’t a community.
paul: thinking that lots of people can’t see the other part of this twittering about
paul: @Prokofy you choose what you believe - you choose what you follow - i haven’t mentioned social darwinism at all
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I absolutely refute any such determinist and all-encompassing notion of human nature, as “dictated by its community”
paul: @Prokofy I’m not just talking about online though - in fact, the thought came from thinking about offline communities
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet this is one of the deep, deep, corporativist, nay, fascistic fallies of Beth Noveck and Clay Shirky’s group fetishizing and groupism
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet they would have you defined online as always and everywhere “in a group” that grooms and conforms you to norms. No thanks!
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, you just practice it : )
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, that’s just your doctrine. People aren’t defined merely or even especially by communities. Many other factors are at play.
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet it’s a basic tenet of the Western liberal idea that the individual is unique and free and not subject to these restrictions
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet but I do realize that you simply don’t believe this; you may not even understand it.
paul: @Prokofy blog your thinking and I’ll comment
Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I just did : )
paul: thinking that it’s far easier to be rude and unsociable if you’re an avatar and hiding your true identity
paul: @prokofy We don’t live in isolation. We all live in communities. All different. All individual. Soc. Darwinism is about conformism - th …
paul: @prokofy link to the blog post? Haven’t yet seen it
paul: pjnet enjoying being challenged by @prokofy
I just found this a bit weird. It was an off-the-cuff thought that I was musing over, and the conversation got hijacked and rude very fast.
The conversation was interesting though. There’s a wikipedia page on Social Darwinism.
I do think however that we are changed by the communities we interact with. It’s all about which communities we choose to be a part of. They can be big or small, and can have big or small influences. But you can’t be a part of a community without being changed in some way by it.
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May 14, 2008 at 6:39 am
Prokofy Neva
You need to study what you say more closely to understand the inherent contradiction in what you are saying, repeatedly.
First, you say that people “are a product of the communities they inhabit”. That makes it sound like communities put a stamp on them that they can’t eradicate, that they affect them so profoundly that they can’t be free of it. And indeed, that *is* the case in many — even most — cultures of the world outside the West, where it is very hard for a woman, a racial minority, a gay, a non-believer, a stranger, to eradicate their identifying marks and be equal or be invisible like the dominant sex, race, power, etc.
You don’t even really know what you mean by “a product of a community”.
Then, you double back later and say, oh, but people can CHOSE what communities they inhabit. Well, maybe in some small scope of your world, where people can chose to be in the soccer club or the stamp collectors’ club. They can’t unchose being a black, however; they can’t unchose having a southern accent; they can’t unchose “Muslim” or “Catholic” in their biographies, even if they regularly disassociate and denounce these communities.
If you believe the individual has free will, then you will not come up with these contrived ideas that he is inescapably stamped and marked by communities. But perhaps you don’t believe in free will, if you are a social Darwinist, or a Marxist economic determinist, or believe in some reworked form of Zen or neurological linguistic programming or ANY system that tells you people are shaped by forces over which they have no control except to chose how they react (a standard staple of this sort of belief system).
The word “community” is constantly invoked online often in very tribalistic ways. People don’t like the communities they are born into, or have to have jobs or live in, so they try to find like-minded people they can be free and real with online. Inherent in that act however is often some kind of evasion or subterfuge.
Yes, there are some circumstances you are born into and cannot change — but perhaps the way to understand this, then, is that it is not a chosen community if imposed on you. But even if you chose to become a member of some other community as a result, you remain an individual, capable of choice, and the ability of the community merely to behave like some blind stamping force on you is hopefully restrained.
May 14, 2008 at 9:08 am
padajo
People are a product of the communities they inhabit - and I stick by that. Not just by “communities”, but by the ones they inhabit. Those last two words are key in that statement and cannot be removed from the previous words. That doesn’t mean that a person is bound to each and every community, to follow that communities norms, but it does mean that a person is changed (in a big or small way) by those communities.
I think you are misusing the word community, or certainly using it in a way that I am not. I think your view of community is too wide and much more fixed on certain points than mine is. I would say that a person cannot choose their attributes (black, female) or their cultural identity (usually around where you live/grow up), but they can choose their belief systems (muslim, catholic) and they can choose which people they associate with (golf club, bars frequented… twitter).
It’s hugely important to separate those things that a person can change and those things they can’t. I do not think it is about attributes or culture (necessarily).
I am talking mainly about associations when I talk about communities. This is absolutely key, because it’s the choice of the individual what associations they are a part of. Who they choose to associate with, and how much they are a part of that community will change that person.
Communities do change people. Communities do affect people, both positively and negatively. If you choose to be a part of a community, you are engaging with people, and that engagement will automatically mean you have to give and take in some way. The best thing is, that because we all belong to different communities at the same time, very few of us have the same basis for decision making, so we are all individuals. The other thing is that we don’t have to accept exactly what the community tells us, but we also don’t have to stop being a part of it because of that.
Social Darwinism appears to me to be more about elitism and survival of the “fittest” individual in society (although - and here’s a contradiction - “fittest” appears to be defined by the social darwinist). It also appears to be a lot to do with saying that those at the top or bottom of a society are there because of some wierd form of economic natural selection. I certainly don’t ascribe to that view, and I don’t understand why you think I would. I don’t see how my comments can be attributed to that view. I do think that you are taking my comments and incorrectly filling in the blanks about my personal thinking - I think they call that an assumption.
Communities change a person. The community also changes itself. Communities change and grow in different ways though. Some are anarchistic with no-one in charge. Others are highly controlled and aim to get the community to conform. Others are led by charismatic leaders. Others are run by committee. Or it’s a combination of the previous options plus other characteristics. It’s your choice which you communities you join, and what comes out the other end is a person who is changed by the choices they make… something is produced by that person’s interaction with those communities. That product can and will continually change, but it’s always affected by what has gone before. A product is not a fixed point that then continues forever, it is a pulling together of what has gone before. Time will change every person - that’s just psychology.
A person *is* a product of the communities they inhabit. Maybe I should add in “choice” to this statement? Or make it clearer what my understanding of “community”. Twitter only has 140 characters and I can’t produce a thesis and all my background understanding in such a short amount of space!
Free will is very important in this - hence the comments about association and choice. A person must have free will to associate and disassociate with a community. Whether that is accepted by the community is another matter. I do believe that a person is affected by their associations and that can sometimes be visible or invisible. Your association still produces something.
To be honest, I don’t understand why you’ve acted so angrily or rude to me about this subject? I can only guess that through experience you dislike some of the ideas I’m expressing.
May 14, 2008 at 12:09 pm
padajo
Just had a twitter from a twitter-friend pointing at another twitter:
http://twitter.com/094459/statuses/810948232
“qualities you acquire online — whether it’s confidence or insecurity — can spill over and change your conduct in the real world” - Time
May 18, 2008 at 8:25 am
Prokofy Neva
I’m not persuaded that you “pick up” qualities online, and if you do, that they “spill over” into real life. This sounds fanciful and really flakey to me. Your being comes from within and manifests online, perhaps differently than offline, but it’s still you.
I don’t believe people are products of other people, or that associating with their free will somehow brands or stamps them with some category called “community”.
I think you could perceive the perfectly ordinary and straightforward things I’m saying as “rude” or “angry” if you never had to ever hear anyone tell you “no,” if you were spoiled as a child perhaps, or simply always were surrounded by people just like yourself who were likeminded. I wonder how people manage to live such sheltered lives.
Perhaps you suffer from this problem:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121063808679386853.html
“Dislike” isn’t a meaningful category here.
When I see someone twittering a sort of “mandate” or “rule for living” like you are doing with this thinking out loud that “you are a product of the communities you inhabit,” I can only say very normally, naturally, and instinctively, “hell, no, not me,” which isn’t *about* you, it isn’t “being rude to you” or any “community behaviour session” in which you get to play Miss Manners, it’s a straightforward call to end the bullshit, and end the oppressive tribalism. People are individuals, with free will, and not “products of communities”. It’s a horrid utilitarian statement with profound consequences.
The idea that people can “choose their belief systems” belongs to a Western world that many people on the planet don’t have the luxury of indulging in. It doesn’t matter if a Jew who no longer practices any formal religion ceases his religious practice; where he is a minority among Muslims he will always remain a Jew — or visa versa.
The idea that engagement and interaction somehow “shapes” you is part of this neural Buddhism that David Brooks has captured fairly well
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/13/opinion/edbrooks.php
that is, that people aren’t distinct entities shaping themselves but are merely nodes along a continuum being shaped by some Hive Mind. ugh.
You parrot that perfectly with this line:
“That product can and will continually change, but it’s always affected by what has gone before. A product is not a fixed point that then continues forever, it is a pulling together of what has gone before. Time will change every person - that’s just psychology.”
People don’t change. They certainly don’t change because they log on and hang out with some “community” online. It’s a deep deception to think they do and to build policy aruond it.
“Time heals no wounds; the patient is not there.” T.S. Eliot
May 22, 2008 at 1:56 pm
padajo
Prokofy Neva, I do find your view of the world to be negative and pessimistic. In my experience people do change.
All I want to say now is Grace and Peace to you from my Lord Jesus Christ.
May 23, 2008 at 10:47 am
jt
We’re all individuals! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/quotes
May 23, 2008 at 10:56 am
padajo
jt - Nice!
That’s cheered me up