List serves are huge here at Old-Dead-Guy University. I, like many students am on a number of list serves and have seen a number of different examples of people violating the social norms or conventions on the list serv. The particular convention I am talking about is what I will call NSS, or no stupid s...tuff. This is the idea where if a list serve is designed for a specific group or purpose, do not send out emails, wasting people's time, of things that are irrelevant or obnoxious or completely irrelevant to the purpose of the list serve.
There are a couple of different ways that the Leviathan comes to the table and controls and punishes those who violate this norm. There are some list serves that have a hierarchy of people's power. There is someone who has control outside of the list serve that can punish for violating this norm. This person is a boss, professor, or coach perhaps. This person often is also the one posting the most, having the most say, etc. Sometimes however, the more interesting way, is what happens when people control it themselves.
On one specific list serve I am on, people do have regular posts that are primarily functional, and occasionally for outside things. There have been times that someone will post a party invitation, and forget to take certain people who wouldn't want to know off of the list, and have been reprimanded for doing so. This is not a violation of NSS but it is a variation of it, because people need to be careful of who the audience members are or their email will be come SS. Often, people being reprimanded are done so publicly, so new members or old members quickly see the norm by trial and error of themselves and other people.
The Leviathan is the power that makes people conform to the NSS standard. This is not one person often, but can be. Mackinnon believes that the Leviathan exists because we want the environment to exist. People follow netiquette because it is the way to make the environment survive. Wallace mentions that even in unmoderated settings the Leviathan will emerge because of the human willingness to conform in order to survive. I believe that the the reason for the Leviathan is purely because of survival. Those who do not care for something to survive, will not conform. Watching the humiliation of one particular member of a team list serve last year when they posted a completely useless email was a great example of how a group becomes its own Leviathan. Nobody told the person it was wrong, but the email was followed up overnight be almost 20 different emails that were very similar, but clearly sarcastic. The line from page 73 of Wallace's book is perfect: "Through signs on the door, reproaches, and out own willingness to conform, we each become a cell in the body of that mortal god, the Leviathan."
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3 comments:
I was immediately drawn to your blog post after reading the title. Although I have never heard of the term NSS, I completely understood what you were referring to, once explained. I happen to belong to many list serves myself, that all serve various functions. I find it extremely irritating when other members of the list serve take advantage and use it to contact people for other purposes. Eventually, the long list of emails, not pertaining to anything of personal importance, starts filling up my mailbox, and I am forced to either delete them all or take the time to sort them through. Thankfully, because this type of online behavior is not considered acceptable, my mailbox has not yet filled to capacity. There are people who defy conforming to the rules (netiquette), however, most people are too concerned about what others think. This concern is what acts as the Leviathan in list serve emails.
I too think that the leviathan is something that has to come from within ourselves and that is how these listserves without a general manager are able to be so effective. One would think that without that one person in charge, people would never behave and simply do whatever they want to in these e-mail chains, but the reality is completely the opposite. I recently had an experience with this as well, when I returned home to find 30 new messages on the same topic, when these messages were only directed to about a quarter of the people on the listserve. At the top, I found an e-mail from one girl who stated, also very sarcastically, that this number of e-mails is ridiculous and that there should be a separate listserve dedicated to solely that group of people, and so they created one. It is unbelievable how when necessary, we become our own Leviathans in different situations. Without this innate wanting to fit in and confirm, listserves would be chaos. It’s a good thing that there is a little Leviathan in each of us just waiting to come out at the right time.
I really really enjoyed how you described the "no stupid stuff policy". I also wrote about list-serves but I focused more on the netiquette aspect. I think the NSS policy really described a norm on list-serves that everyone conforms to. Its the most annoying thing to receive 100 emails from the same list-serve about very stupid stuff. I feel that the Leviathan in this case is not only the people in charge of the list-serve, like the hierarchy you refered to, but also the people receiving the email because they have the ability to respond to the emails with the proper "raised eyebrow" or punishment.
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