Getting back to blogging after some months away on client business etc.
One of my most interesting “anthro-ish” experiences in past months happened on election night. I was at home clicking between upteen websites as results came in. (BTW the best political prediction website IMO is www.fivethirtyeight.com – which is authored by a former sports data geek who has truly amazing skills in polls and analysis).
But the most interesting online discussion IMO wasn’t on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, or the comments sections on any of the news sites. It was the international chat hosted by the US State Department.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the US State Department’s communications outreach programs included web chats. But they were in full swing on election night: chats in various languages (I was on the English chat, but there were others in various languages) moderated by State Department employees (who used online names like “John” and “Petra” and who only took supervisory action against the occasional instance of profanity/obscenity.)
Several dozen people (during my ~2 hrs in the English speakers’ chat) actually logged in and chatted — mostly on topic, with many of the same questions asked repeatedly (who won the election? when would results be final? what do those numbers (the electoral count) mean? etc.). Using the common active:lurker ratio of ~9:1 implies a lurker/reader audience of up to ~200-300+.
This is one of the truly new capabilities provided by the internet: the ability for strangers from around the world to come together and have a real-time discussion about a specific topic. Most interaction online tends to build on existing off-line relationships (email, Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, etc.). Some online discussion areas coalesce around ongoing interests, which again often tend to be bounded by nationality or language (the Well, Salon and Slate discussion groups, Etsy communities, Flickr groups, various blogger networks, etc.). Even in media fandom (my touchstone for online community behaviors, as it’s one of the oldest and most developed online communities) tends to self-segregate around language preference and national identity (as the source/canon media itself does). (Wikipedia’s entry for virtual communities is a pretty good overview of the types and roles in online communities.)
But on this State dept chat — it was like a global pick-up game. Participants said they were from countries in South America, Africa, Europe; Asian country participants began to show up later in the evening. Most of the visitors came across as ESL, not English primary. Some were knowledgeable about the American election process; most were not. People demonstrated different norms around chat: attempts at humor in particular were common and ideosyncratic. Participants did occasionally break off and have a brief 1:1 chat if they saw another participant from their country/language (with all chats visible to the group as a whole — there was no private chat feature). But most of the discussion occurred between strangers of different nationalities. And most of the discussion happened with little direction or interaction from the American moderators, who tended to stay in the background.
It was an extraordinary moment — in the midst of an enormous event with millions of people voting and many more millions waiting for the result — a small crowd of strangers from around the globe came together for a few hours to chat.
