exFamily.org > chatboards > genX > archives > post #2539

The bulletin board as a medium of communication

Posted by WC (gen coordinator) on July 30, 2002 at 12:52:40:

It's great that we're having a busy genX board and lots of traffic and lots of participation. But our bulletin boards are not really the pulse of life of this site, or a good indicator of what it is accomplishing.

Aside from what is going on here on the boards, our site acts as a relay station for people wanting to get in touch with other people, with authors of articles. We are collecting information constantly which we can hardly keep up with. We have had almost 1 million hits since we launched a little over 5 months ago. Our articles are widely read, and many people do not even read the boards. Even then, posts on the genX board are read on average 150 times each. Many people read but do not post. Everything we are doing here is viewed by a wide spectrum of readers, and we plan to take things to a higher level soon.

IMO bulletin boards are over-rated, but I can still really see the need for one. We are accomplishing great things through them: connecting with people we've never met before, making new friends, helping each other out with advice, learning from each other, having a place to collect information, etc.

Bulletin boards are real neat things!

However the very things that make them "neat" or a such good and strong medium of communication, are themselves weaknesses.

One factor is the dynamics "public speaking" on the boards will create - even if you are replying to one person, you are speaking to many. This can be a chance to share information that needs to be discussed openly for the benefit of all. Or it can be a show or a circus.

Another factor is the "random access = no proper dialog" sydrome:

Internet user culture dictates that we cater to fickleness of visitors - we can't force them to read and open everything in serial - if they can't do as they please and read selectively or if something takes more than 10 seconds waiting time, Internet users will go away. Boards that do not allow random access to posts are the least popular.

A person may arrive at any time (maybe even be a first time visitor), come and go as they please (while the topics are changing and being updated constantly) glance over the Table of Contents, read posts selectively, see (pay attention to) only the things he/she wants to... and at any level of participation (reading) in a conversation suddenly decide to interact and post a message. The result is that things can be out of context, out-of-sync with the topic/thread, misunderstood, etc.

In fact, log analysis will show that visitors often do open and read only what they want (they usually have a few favorite people they read, and go for the catchy titles) and they do tend to "answer a matter before (thoroughly) hearing it."The ideal is that people who reply to topics (and you'll notice I put "post a REPLY" above the reply form in every post, and not "jump off to another topic unrelated to this post"), should stick to the topics actually being discussed, and not refer to things that are from another board, another time, and based on assumptions or quotes that can't really be remembered word for word anymore. They should quote something they are refering to, for the audience at large, and not take it for granted everyone else knows what they do about someone.

But that might be asking a tad too much - sometimes this is simply not the way people work.

Good familiarity vs bad familiarity
For any community virtual or real to interact effectively and comfortably, there will have to be some kind of familiarity - people will draw from a knowlege outisde of the posts about the person they are interacting with. Assumptions have to be made, and regular posters shouldn't be made to cover all their bases (asses) and speak politically correctly or explain themselves all the time.

The problem is that some people are adept at hiding behind this inherent nebulous nature of bulletin board posts to imply that a statement made in familiarity is the truth about someone. In other words, since we have to be able to be familiar, we can just act real familiar and talk like something is a fact that we assume everyone else knows or infer that it was a previously agreed fact between the parties, and hey presto, what I am saying will be understood by the audience at large to be true. And the person will have go to work defending himself/herself, which is real tedious and hopefully I might be able to wear him/her out while I bully.

Ironically, I am all too familiar with people who use this cruel game and I am hoping you will assume this to be true :-p

Anonymity
The way boards like ours are set up, they can be used to create online personas, pen names, handles... identities which serve a purpose in communicating ideas. When shielded with anonymity, people are able to speak freely and show sides to themselves they would normally never share. This is a great thing.

Anonymity and allowance for alternate/multiple pen names can be useful for drawing attention to the post rather than bias against the person. It can also also create "floating head syndrome" problems.

Needless to say, some see it as an opportunity for mischief or cruetly. There can be even a tendency to think that there is a form of entertainment, and nothing to be taken too seriously since these are online created-personalities. But the people who make/read these posts are real people, with real lives, real experiences and real feelings. They can be hurt. Seriously hurt.

If people can write saying how much the boards have helped them heal, it shows that it can also work the other way to wound.

Virtual or real gatherings will result in groups, gangs, cliques and voting blocks - there's not much we can do about that. Sometimes, people get "flamed" by gangs intentionally or unintentionally. That is a phenomenon of the boards and the Internet in general (spam, flame, virus attacks, info overkill). But it would be wrong to assume that gangs and cliques working in coordination whenever a few people seem to concur and post at the same time.

That is another weakness about bulletin boards: in a virtual community you don't actually see the people you are dealing with, and you can't see their body language and who they are talking to. Suspicions about who is hording with whom can often be wrong. There seem to be some who relish playing on the fear that everyone is ganging up on them.

As a coordinator and participant of bulletin board discussions, one of the ways I understand that someone is technically crossing the line, is when that person speaks out of context, and refers to things outside of the post they are replying to.

A typical scenario for such offenders:

not taking a post for what it says
playing on a familiarity with the person that the person does not welcome (in my book this is an intrusive act akin to invasion of privacy)
getting under their skin of the person
talking about the person instead of the subject he/she is bringing up
making it personal, not subjective
making subtle inferences to know something about the poster (and therefore cannot respect what the poster is saying)
invalidating the person's opinion by attacking the person
diverting the discussion into something unrelated to the topic originally discussed
...etc

So much of this is basically what happens in real life, and not just on bulletin boards. To ask for it not to happen is to ask for an ideal world - I have not always lived up to these ideals myself. In dealing with such offenders, I may have become an offender myself. Perhaps it's like a cop shooting to kill someone who is about to spray the crowd with bullets.

So all I can ask for, is for users of our boards to be aware of these inherent problems with the bulletin board medium and do their best to work around them, to make up for the lacks by going out of the way to be courteous and extra communicative, and not to assume people know all the things we know/think and talk from there.

So what can we do?

We need to answer to posts as they are and not draw on outside information which can't be referenced. If refering to something, kindly quote it.
We need to be extra careful about not being over familiar about another online persona's real life which we really know nothing about.
On the other hand, since we need familiarity for comfortable interaction, let's not use the familiarity as a way of bullying - making statements about people too liberally or poking at them over and over.

In even plainer English:

This ain't Crossfire.

From our Rules and Guidelines:

"This discussion board is for those who are contemplating leaving the Family/Children of God, those who have left, and those with questions about the existence of abuses.

"This is meant to be a place of discussion where ideas and debates are encouraged; a board primarily for intelligent discussions, intelligent social exchanges and polite debate."

In even plainer idiot-proof English:
This is not a place for vendettas and attacks on fellow posters. Thanks for hearing me out.

WC (gen coordinator)