Assignment #6 - Hunting the Leviathan in the 245 Blogs

The Leviathan is a powerful force that affects our experiences using the Internet. There are a multitude of methods he can use to make people adhere to the norms of a specific online context. He can simply publicly admonish someone for using inappropriate language in a chat room. He also uses more subtle tactics. For example, the Leviathan is responsible for the uncomfortable you get when someone casually admits to the fact they checked out your Facebook wall to know that you just went from “it’s complicated” to “in a relationship”. It’s just understood that Facebook is reserved to the online world only.

Blogs are a space where the Leviathan is has a strong presence. An example that immediately came to mind was the Comm245 blogs. The Leviathan uses two means to enforce the social norms of the nature of the comments with both explicit and subtle methods. The students were introduced to the set of rules that need to be adhered to in order to participate. In the syllabus, it states, “Absolutely no profane or blatantly antagonistic posts will be tolerated. Disrespectful posts will result in the loss of all credit towards the assignments at the discretion of the instructor.” The consequences for violation of the set rules leads the Leviathan, by the means of either Professor Hancock or one of the TAs, to punish the person responsible for inappropriate posts.

Additionally, the Leviathan also emerges when the bloggers take it upon themselves the task of creating an acceptable social standard for the space. In the first assignment, the students in the class determined the environment of the blog by choosing to write their posts using an informal style, as is typical for online posts. However, once it was suggested in class to formalize the writing technique used, those who continued in the relaxed style might have been advised by their peers in their comments to step-up their level of writing. In this instance, the Leviathan doesn’t employ harsh police power to maintain order, but relies on the subtly of the friendly critiques from group members.

Wallace explains in her analysis to conformity on the net that in general there is less pressure to conform online than in FtF interactions due to the fact that the person is virtually anonymous and is not swayed by physical influences. Because of the this fact, it’s imperative for there to be a Leviathan to regulate what is being said and posted online. Yet, even if there were no distinct Leviathan apparent in a group space (chat rooms, blogs, newsgroups), over time one would appear because of “human willingness to conform and our eagerness to preserve an online group environment”. This supports the SIDE Theory, which states that in when group identity is salient, and the people are visually anonymous, the instance of conformity will increase. The Leviathan, whether officially or implictly,