User:Settdigger

Wikipolitics

By Robin Wyatt Dunn (Settdigger)

--

People on wikis. Folks sitting alone, in their apartment, in the library, at a bookstore, a cafe, on a train, typing away. In a way, wikipolitics is just the politics of the Internet: how people behave in groups when they can't see each other's faces or hear each other's voices (leaving aside audio and video chatting).

It is my hope that this might be developed into some kind of narrow primer on the evolving human politics of wikis.

-- Politics: a brief definition. Politics is what people do together. More specifically, it's what people do together in numbers large enough to form cities (politics comes from polis, Greek for "city state.").

What do people do together? All kinds of stuff?

One of the things they do?

Write.

-- Writing: a brief definition. Narrowly construed, writing is graphemes representing human thought. On a screen, on paper, marks. Marks that have made meaning in your old brain.

What it does: obviously, communicate. But: in a way different from talking out loud to your friend. Obviously, when writing letters through the mail, you don't see your pen pal's face, hear their voice, see their body language, smell them (or taste them). (Although if you have a sexy pen pal, they might leave their perfume on the paper).

How writing communicates: it takes time. Obviously, in 30 seconds of conversation with your friend at cafe or a bar, you receive lots of information through all your senses, and you react every second to that information. Reading a letter from your friend, you have less information, and you must interpret it more heavily, focusing on each word, each sentence, each paragraph. Too, you can notice handwriting. Maybe they dripped blood on the page? God forbid.

--

Politics meet writing:

Of course, we're back round the Paleolithic Campfire again. Our village elder tells stories five nights a week. Great entertainment (he's been doing it a while), but more than that: it tells us who we are. Because these stories are so important for group identity, not everyone gets to tell them. You have to learn how.

In this way, these aboriginal campfire stories were different from everyday conversations: they were structured. They had elaborate traditions (creation myths, etc.). You had to stick around in your tribe, you had to care about the stories, you had to learn them, and slowly, slowly, slowly, you could offer to tell your own versions.

Change accretes slowly in these kinds of important foundation stories. In a political way, you must earn the right to contribute.

- -

So then: Wikipolitics. As we have seen, mix politics with writing and right away, right away, we arrive at the principle of exclusion. Are politics and writing anti-democratic by their very nature? Obviously not. But: I would say that because writing, in a literate society, has such profound effects on people's brains, human societies have always worked hard to limit who is allowed to write. As we know, literacy is power. Writing is power. The power to convince, the power to educate, the power to move people's emotions with poetry, story, anecdote, fact, opinion, hearsay, rumor, myth, legend. It's the stuff we're made of: along with physics and biology, it's what makes us tick.

- -

And yet: wikis are all about inclusion. Let in the mobs, let them edit. (In theory). But that is clearly their intent, and we have a new word for it now: "crowdsourcing." The "wisdom of crowds" - not a term our ancestors would necessarily have understood. But maybe they would have: it's little different from the "limbic democracies" of Robert Charles Wilson's novel "Vortex," where people's medullas (the emotional, instinctive center of the brain), are linked via software and hardware to get a kind of wetware consensus.

Of course: writing is slow, and awkward, more or less my design. It takes time. It does not allow for immediate decisions.

--

Thanks, Settdigger (discuss • contribs) 19:47, 8 September 2012 (UTC)