Thoughts on exclusion and culture

[davewitley]

I want in this post to expose what I see as an intersting issue in 
the debate that has emerged here.  This is the sense of social 
exclusion that has been expressed on both sides.

I want to approach it via the idea of a social metaphor for list 
participation.  I believe most of us have some 'real life' analogue 
in mind when we participate in list discussion (I know that the 
internet is just as real as any other part of life but that's what 
we seem to be stuck with calling it).  In the analogue, some social 
situations are experienced as uncomfortable or discomforting, and it 
becomes part of etiquette for others to try to relieve that 
discomfort, and rudeness to persist in not relieving it once 
revealed, or to knowingly create it.

The problem most of us have is that an internet forum is not 
precisely parallel to *any* physical social situation, and so we 
(the human race, not just HPFGU) are still learning what forms of 
discomfort are unavoidable, what have to be balanced against one 
another, and what are always unacceptable.  As part of that learning 
process we bring along our largely preconceived social metaphors and 
start to judge behaviour by them.

What I want to do is to eamine a couple of specific social metaphors 
and show how they lead to different expectations of what is polite 
behaviour, and therefore mismatched perceptions of politeness and 
rudeness by list members.  Unfortunately, I cannot offer any 
solution that will despatch this problem, but I hope that I can help 
list members become more able to accept the behaviour of others by 
increasing understanding, and so reduce tension.

The first metaphor is that of the party.  This has been put forward 
in discussions before, certainly within the admin team but I think 
also on OTC.  In this metaphor, we imagine groups of people holding 
conversations.  People may join or leave a particular group, or 
participate in more than one conversation at once.  A conversation 
corresponds to a thread on HPFGU.  In this metaphor, each person 
knows more or less who is in the group (on HPFGU there is an unknown 
number of lurkers but this does not affect the argument), and 
addresses their remarks to that group.  In list posting terms that 
may lead to in-jokes and other forms of behaviour that may seem 
excluding to other people not in that group at that time.  In the 
metaphor, that's acceptable, because those people aren't there - 
they are on the other side of the room, having their own 
conversation, or sitting quietly in a corner.  On a list, though, 
there is no definition of who is 'in' a thread: potentially any list 
member may be trying to join in by reading posts.

Now let's amend the party metaphor slightly.  We now have a group 
holding a conversation, but they are native speakers of two 
different languages, say English and French.  Some of the group are 
fluent in both languages, but not all, and poor speakers of both 
languages are present.  Suppose the conversation has been going on 
in English, when suddenly one of the French speakers who can't 
manage English very well turns to a fellow francophone and continues 
the conversation in French.  How does that make the English-speakers 
whose French ability is poor feel?  How did the fact that the 
conversation was formerly English-only make the French speakers 
feel? Do the fluently bilingual have any special duties in the 
situation?  To some extent I think something like this lies behind 
Eileen's coment that TBAY allows things to be said that can't be 
said (by her?) in any other way, and Shaun's complaint about people 
moving threads into TBAY.  I have been in real-life (there it is 
again) situations precisely like that, in all the roles, and it's 
just tough - somewhere along the line someone will feel 
disadvantaged, or excluded, or fed up at having to carry the 
translation load. However, they don't degenerate into fights and 
rancour, because everyone understands it's difficult and makes 
allowances.  (I see that since I wrote the above Shaun has raised 
the parallel of the foreign language.)

My second metaphor is that of the academic seminar.  (I personally 
have always felt uneasy about the party metaphor, largely because 
the seminar metaphor was the one that I naturally assumed when I 
started here.  In fact, so strong was its grip on me that I had 
difficulty understanding some of the impulses for a 
conference/convention.  Why wait to get a load of people into a room 
to give a paper and discuss it when we are in a room 24/7 and can 
discuss anything put forward by anyone all the time?  Sure, it's 
great to get together, but couldn't we major on the casual things we 
*can't* do online, like just hanging?  But I digress.)  In this 
metaphor, someone has the floor, and makes a more formal comment or 
even something approximating a short speech.  Everyone else in the 
room is expected to keep quiet while that person speaks, and in 
return the person is expected to speak up, enunciate clearly, and so 
on.  It's rude, in this metaphor, to mumble, or insist on addressing 
only some of the group.  In discussion list terms, posters would be 
required to make their posts accessible to the known weaknesses of 
their audience.  In the context of TBAY, I should add that, in this 
metaphor, there is no requirement to take account of the possibility 
that people don't *like* TBAY, only that they find it hard to read, 
or that, like Eileen's brother, they find aspects baffling or 
meaningless.

You can see how, in an academic seminar, it would be rude for a 
group of people to hold a private conversation (even supposing it 
not to be disruptive to listening to the floor), and at a party, for 
someone to insist that people in the far corner speak up so everyone 
can hear.  And you can see how, in the context of an internet 
discussion group, these metaphors begin to break down: offlist 
continuations of a thread are not necessarily rude, nor is a post 
from a newbie requesting clarification of another post.

What obligation do we as posters have to our readers?  I don't mean 
under list rules, but in common humanity.  Should TBAYers consider 
the 'Eileen's brothers' who populate the list?  Should academically 
inclined people like me (I have additionally honed my writing skills 
with many years of writing cases that are supposed to survive 
rigorous scrutiny) do more to put at ease those we intimidate?  I 
don't know - I don't think anyone knows.

I think in the long run we should try to leave these metaphors 
behind, and consider how our actions as posters affect readers of 
all kinds.  That's an easy ideal to aim for, and a hard one to 
achieve, if only because we know so little of the contexts into 
which our words are going.  Even simple rules of thumb for 
politeness are more local than we realise, and fool us on the global 
internet.

I suppose the main conclusion is that all this is a matter for list 
members, not list administrators.

David