Community

When writing inspiration hits, I cannot stop. I am wordy and long-winded. This was something I was reminded of in my brain dumping activity for the Community Assignment last night when I wrote about six single-spaced pages about one of my two communities. No synthesis, no analysis, just everything else.

Olaf says everything makes sense when you are older....uhhh

Clearly, even though I did not feel like an insider within the community by any means, I clearly am more on the inbound trajectory than I realized as I set out to explain the inner-workings to someone unfamiliar. (Although, I suppose my trajectory would be more on the boundary seeing what my motivations and purposes are in joining the community?)

In this activity, I was going back through the community in search of screen grabs to include as visuals. In this pursuit, I clicked on threads I hadn't explored deeply up to that point. What I found changed some of my opinions on the community. I had been championing the community for being so fair an balanced, something I have rarely experienced in online spaces. Members communicated in coherent full sentences and all seemed to know enough about their chosen topics to ask good questions and provide great insight into their answers as well. However, in the pursuit of learning just how many moderators were present on the site, I realized came across a few threads complaining about the hierarchy and "pecking order" within the site.

The community I immersed myself in for two weeks

Maybe I really wasn't on the inbound? I never noticed any kind of pecking order. I didn't see discourse being corrected by moderators, but it clearly exists. Was it the subject of the threads I chose to engage with over two weeks that hid this seedy-underbelly? Was it the time of day of which I engaged? Did the moderators work so swiftly that I never knew that unsavory posts existed? Is the censorship a part of life or is it damaging to the illusion of free speech?

In two weeks within such a large community, I did not become acquainted with the profiles that are said to be "untouchable." Sure, I saw people that clearly have been around for over twenty years, people that must interact each and every day on the site, and even people that are paid by the site to spend their entire days managing the hundreds of thousands of member interactions.

I wish I could live within this space longer and just compare and contrast my innocent view from the past two weeks to the updated view with this new knowledge.

Have you come across anything in collecting your thoughts that has changed the tone of your assignment?