Absorbing Rules

Having spent a very large proportion of my life in the thick of a community whose main defining point is that no other communities are allowed, I have found it slightly strange to dabble in others. The most obvious ones being online.

Facebook, while handy, still feels just a little bit creepy to me, I suppose because its sole purpose is as a means of interaction between friends, and friends always feel as if they deserve more personal attention than messages on a cyberspace noticeboard. So for the moment I tend to stay semi-detached from that community. I also dabble from time to time in a photography website with lively forum pages, which is always a sign of a set of people who feel themselves to be a community, but always feel something of an outsider there as anyone who doesn't contribute on an almost hourly basis is ignored as a part-timer. I have observed that any successful forum seems to have a hard core of utterly dedicated people who feel a certain sense of ownership, and a self-developed set of more or less arcane rules and etiquettes.

Such rules seem to be necessary as a dividing line between the insiders and others, but they do vary from case to case whether the effect is to include or exclude. The photographic site I mentioned has a presumably unintentional bias towards exclusion, as do many others where the topics are subject to strong opinions. The sense I get is that you need to pay your dues in some way in order to be accepted.

But what started me thinking about this was Flickr, which is altogether different. It is designed to feel like a community, but a welcoming one, and I feel at ease with it because it's about something definite, unlike Facebook. But I have gradually become aware of subtleties that weren't immediately obvious, ways in which a joiner gradually slips into the ways of the network.

I have been posting pictures for a while now, and it gets to be mildly addictive as some get attention and others don't. And so I find I am more likely to post things similar to those that were liked before, and that begins modifying, slightly, my actions when I create in the first place. And a certain sort of caption seems to work, and so I spend a few moments more in each case thinking of that kind. And I try out groups to see where like-minded people are.

And what really struck me was that if a loose and optional community at a distance can have powerful behavioural effects that slip in almost unnoticed, it's not surprising that the all-encompassing brethren network shapes the participators' thoughts and actions to the extent it does, such that even those of us who have made a conscious decision to leave them behind find we still get tangled in the after-effects. I have always maintained that the "rules" and "control" spoken of as endemic to the brethren are rather overstated. But then when each person spends their life unconsciously adjusting to what the others think of them, maximising attention and wishing for affection and respect, control in the strict sense becomes almost superfluous.