Cyber Disinhibition

The OED defines Society as:-

1. the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
2. a particular community of people living in a country or region, and having shared customs, laws, and organizations.
3. (also high society) people who are fashionable, wealthy, and influential, regarded as a distinct social group.
4. an organization or club formed for a particular purpose or activity.
5. the situation of being in the company of other people.

This entry in Wikipedia >> adds more, but doesn’t substantially alter the key definition.

Society on-line is, I think, a combination of the first and second of these, the community being that of on-line connected people, no longer so much geographic, although geopgraphy still plays a part. Society on line is not well defined, there are customs and ways of working, but none are universal and few are consistently applied. How we define it becomes harder as we dig deeper.

Societies tend to have common rules and acceptable behaviours which define ‘a more or less ordered community‘ not everyone buys into the rules and some accept them whilst still breaking them. On-line the social norms in one place applied in another can create tension and less order, and often there aren’t well defined resolution systems. These issues became apparent early and a number of recognisable issues, which any society has to address were discussed. Daniel Goleman discussed one aspect of this – Cyber-Disinhibition – here >> It is a key issue as the impact of disinhibited participants in the community is, ultimately, the breakdown of order, and so of the society, in this case, the on-line society.

Societies work best when there is a commonly held view that supports aiding development of the society and worst when that support is abrogated to others. Resolving the impact of disruption is probably the biggest test an on-line society has to face, and it’s here that development of technology is now moving to assist. So, the positive opposite of disruption is collaboration, in the context of society, we need to look at how we can build towards that as well as moving away from those disruptive elements.

Collaborative tools, means of working on-line together, brings the establishment of standard approaches and normalisation of effort around tested processes. Communities that collaborate effectively will be the new society on-line, and to collaborate it must be easy to build and maintain social relations. That’s why the Societal Web will drive developments in technology and software. Interesting times.

I’ll return to how communities are created in future blog.

Twitter this… Click here >>

{ 2 comments }