Knowledge communities... Surviving: Conflict

Jenkins’s account of the rise and fall of the Survivor spoiling community offers some interesting insight into group identity. In the intro to Ch. 1, he claims “it is [...] crisis, conflict, and controversy” that forces groups to come up with definitions of who they are and what they do (26). Just as in “real world” social groups, the stuff binding online communities together is rarely consciously thought of until an unprecedented action or event forces the members of the community to “articulate the principles that guide them.” Shared goals, mutual interests, emotional attachments to a common source of pleasure or entertainment, whatever -- these are the things one begins to scrutinize when some external event challenges the way he or she relates to the group.

So when ChillOne decides to hold the Survivor spoiling community hostage for an entire season, stringing them along with tidbits of information while never identifying his sources or offering to collaborate with his fellow spoilers, the community starts to react. They argue among themselves -- first about ChillOne’s credibility, and later, his motives. Divisions arise, and the way these divisions are expressed -- via verbal conflict centered on a single participant’s behavior -- prompts each individual member to examine his or her own behavior -- and ultimately, the terms of his or her group membership.

Troubling thing is, this is a story in which a consensus is never reached. Was ChillOne’s refusal to play by the rules and openly collaborate with others a breach of the group’s communal values, or was it simply good sport? The various perspectives on this question are never reconciled, and in the wake of ChillOne, SurvivorSucks undergoes a major depopulation. Rather than come to terms, its members disperse.

It could be that consensus just isn’t all that important in communities whose ultimate concern is entertainment -- there isn’t, after all, that much at stake for such groups. So, when individual participants feel that their goals are no longer meshing with the majority’s, they can simply leave without so much as a goodbye. No strings attached. Immediate, unqualified participation helps groups do stuff without having to worry too much about who’s doing it. In such cases, clear definitions of a group’s identity might not be necessary.

Still, for a knowledge community with the goal of greater collective intelligence, consensus might be a desirable thing. I like the following illustration of how collective intelligence operates within a group, told from the perspective of a spoiler: “Someone might lurk [on the boards] for an extended period of time feeling like they have nothing significant to contribute, and then Survivor will locate in a part of the world where they have traveled extensively or a contestant may be identified in their local community, and suddenly they become central to the quest” (53). To lose the lurker is to lose a potential source of intelligence -- the life of the community consists in good numbers.

So my question is this: what happens to communities when they lack the kind of rules, practices, and/or institutions that make sustainable group unity a real possibility? Was the Survivor spoiling community -- driven, in Jenkins’s words, by “voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations” and “reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments” -- always doomed to be just that: temporary and tactical (27)? Could it have continued to flourish had its members found some way to “articulate” a common vision?

As “inspirational consumers” of the like discussed in Ch. 2, we as individuals have unprecedented agency in our choice of affiliations. “Everybody knows something” about this or that... and thus, everybody has more or less equal access to a wide array of digital knowledge communities. If we value our participation in such communities and in the project of collective intelligence, a major challenge will be figuring out a way to promote loyalty to the group in spite of division and conflict. Knowledge may come to depend on it.