Unwieldy communities
I recently signed up for an on-line course in university teaching with Coursera, in part because I was curious to see how massive open on-line courses ("MOOCs") work and in part as a lower-committment alternative to studying for a full-scale graduate certificate in higher education that I decided I wasn't currently able to afford or commit to. I might write more about the MOOC experience when the course is over, but I was first inspired to make a few observations on very large communities.
Logging in to the course for the first time, I was immediately impressed by my own smallness. There's nothing like glancing over hundreds of posts from other learners introducing themselves to remind oneself of what a tiny part of the world one occupies, even the relatively elite world of university teachers. Having happened to re-read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy recently, I readily identified with the Total Perspective Vortex used to torture prisoners by showing them just how insignificant they are compared to the universe in its entirety.
I quickly saw that I was only going to be able skim over the posts made by other learners, and that I couldn't expect other learners to spend any more time appreciating whatever I was going to contribute. I've come to similar realisations reading Usenet articles in the 1990s, and observing the comments sections of popular news web more recently: with so many articles and comments out there to read, and many of them being less than enlightening, reading all of them is a fool's task.
Here lies a problem for the idea that blogs and comments would radically democratise media and political discussion: it simply isn't feasible to hold a conversation with millions of participants. Matthew Hindman details the result for political blogs in The Myth of Digital Democracy (2008): only a tiny handful of blogs have a wide readership, and they're mostly written by the same kind of people who previously wrote widely-read newspaper columns.
Going back to my course, I came to see the main value of posting to the discussion board to be not in intimate conversation with hundreds of my fellow learners, but in working through my own thoughts and putting them into a form in which they might be digested should someone happen to read them. (I take much the same view of this blog.) When reading the discussion board, I can only hope to get an overview of what everyone else is talking about, with only the occassional pause to read an eye-catching item in more depth.
So I hope my classmates won't be too offended if I miss any posts that they've slaved over, only to have them drown in a sea of other posts. It'll take more than a nice web site to expand our brains to encompass conversations with a hundred other people.
