[text=black]A threaded discussion board turns out to be an ideal ecosystem for that peculiar species known as the crank - the ideologue obsessed with a certain issue or interpretive model, who has no qualms about interjecting his or her worldview into any discussion, and apparently no day job or family life to keep him from posting voluminous commentary at the slightest provocation. We all know people like this, the ones grinding their ax from the back of the seminar room or the coffee shop: the conspiracy theorist, the rabid libertarian, the evangelist - the ones who insist on bringing all conversations back to their particular issue, objecting to any conversation that doesn't play by their rules. In real life, we've developed a series of social conventions that keep the crank from dominating our conversations. For the most pathological cases, they simply don't get invited out to dinner very often. But for the borderline case, a subtle but powerful mechanism is at work in any face-to-face group conversation: if an individual is holding a conversation hostage with an irrelevant obsession, groups can naturally establish a consensus - using words, body language, facial expressions, even a show of hands - making it clear that the majority of the group feels their time is being wasted. The face-to-face world is populated by countless impromptu polls that take the group's collective pulse. Most of them happen so quickly that we don't even know that we're participating in them, and that transparency is one reason why they're as powerful as they are. In the face-to-face world, we are all social thermostats: reading the group temperature and adjusting our behavior accordingly.
Some of those self-regulatory social skills translate into cyberspace - particularly in a threaded discussion forum or an e-mail exchange, where participants have the time and space to express their ideas in long form, rather than in the spontaneous eruptions of real-time chat. But there is a crucial difference in an environment like ECHO or the Well - or in the discussion areas we built at FEED. In a public discussion thread, not all the participants are visible. A given conversation may have five or six active contributors and several dozen "lurkers" who read through the posts but don't chime in with their own words. This creates a fundamental imbalance in the system of threaded discussion and gives the crank an opportunity to dominate the space in a way that would be much more difficult off-line. In a threaded discussion, you're speaking both to the other active participants and to the lurkers, and however much you might offend or bore your direct interlocutors, you can always appeal to that silent majority out there - an audience that is both present and absent at the same time. The crank can cling to the possibility that everyone else tuning in is enthralled by his prose, while the active participants can't turn to the room and say, "Show of hands: Is this guy a lunatic or what?"
The crank exploits a crucial disparity in the flow of information: while we conventionally think of threaded discussions as two-way systems, for the lurkers that flow follows a one-way path. They hear us talking, but we hear nothing of them: no laughs, no hisses, no restless stirring, no snores, no rolling eyeballs. When you factor in the lurkers, a threaded discussion turns out to be less interactive than a traditional face-to-face lecture, and significantly less so than a conversation around a dinner table, where even the most reticent participants contribute with gestures and facial expressions. Group conversations in the real world have an uncanny aptitude for reaching a certain kind of homeostasis: the conversation moves toward a zone that pleases as much of the group as possible and drowns out voices that offend. A group conversation is a kind of circuit board, with primary inputs coming from the official speakers, and secondary inputs coming from the responses of the audience and other speakers. The primary inputs adjust their signal based on the secondary inputs of group feedback. Human beings - for reasons that we will explore in the final section - are exceptionally talented at assessing the mental states of other people, both through the direct exchanges of spoken language and the more oblique feedback mechanisms of gesture and intonation. That two-way exchange gives our face-to-face group conversations precisely the flexibility and responsiveness that Wiener found lacking in masscommunications.
I suspect Wiener would immediately have understood the virtual community's problem with cranks and lurkers. Where the Flowers affair was a case of runaway positive feedback, the tyranny of the crank results from a scarcity of feedback: a system where the information flows are unidirectional, where the audience is present and at the same time invisible. These liabilities run parallel to the problems of one-way linking that we saw in the previous chapter. Hypertext links and virtual communities were supposed to be the advance guard of the interactive revolution, but in a real sense they only got halfway to the promised land. (Needless to say, the ants were there millions of years ago.) And if the cranks and obsessive-compulsives flourish in a small-scale online community of several thousand members, imagine the anarchy and noise generated by a million community members. Surely there is a "climax stage" on that scale where the online growth turns cancerous, where the knowable community becomes a nightmare of overdevelopment. If feedback couldn't help regulate the digital villages of early online communication, what hope can it possibly have on the vast grid of the World Wide Web?[/text]
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