[p2p-research] a challenge to social media enthusiasm .. what say you, league of noble peers

[Ryan Lanham]

Michel,

What you include below doesn't surprise me at all; in fact, I've experienced
it first hand several times.  By the way, I think it is equally true of open
source ventures where I have noted an extreme capacity for organizations to
harbor the socially mal-adept, cynical, crypto-elitist and otherwise
self-serving ego-driven types as an overwhelming majority.  As we both have
some first hand experience and since it is a obvious target, it is easy to
visualize a personality profile of, say, Richard Stallman.  One finds
numerous deontologists, etc. in these domains and if these folks entered
paradise they'd complain about the rules.  In short, judgmental people are
drawn to organized commons.  They are contentious, combative, highly
self-certain and almost always judgmental.

It doesn't take a PhD in psychology to realize that many of these people are
expressing power and control in areas where they can do so because they are
maladjusted to conventional social frameworks.  But it does open the
question as to why altruism and selflessness do often occur--and when and
where.

While I have no data to match this Israeli study, my own experience is that
those most committed to public good simply act on it and don't spend so much
time debating their role, how others should act, or what the governance
model is.  They aren't flamboyant about their service.  They simply just do
it.  They are pragmatists.  These are likened to "the spiritual" in
faith-based terms.  And then there is what I can only identify in my own
views as the religious.  They are all about the structure, their position,
the judgment, what is a crisis and what is the solution...and not so much
about the actual doing of something.

Ryan Lanham


On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 6:55 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> from nicholas carr,
>
>
> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/06/the_sour_wikipe.php
>
> The sour Wikipedian June 27, 2009
>
> Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social
> production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character
> traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research
> psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70
> non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it<http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16349-psychologist-finds-wikipedians-grumpy-and-closedminded.html>,
> Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new
> ideas."
>
> In their report<http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/cpb.2007.0225>on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as
> social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net
> than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures of "agreeableness
> and openness." Noting that the findings seem in conflict with public
> perceptions, the researchers suggest that "the prosocial behavior apparent
> in Wikipedia is primarily connected to egocentric motives ... which are not
> associated with high levels of agreeableness."
>
> The researchers also looked at gender differences among Wikipedians. They
> found that the women who contribute to the online encyclopedia exhibit
> unusually high levels of introversion. Women in particular, they suggest,
> "seem to use the Internet as a compensative tool" that allows them to
> "express themselves" in a way "they find difficult in the offline world."
>
> The study is consistent with other research into the motivations underlying
> online social production. Last year, researchers at HP Labs undertook an
> extensive study <http://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.3030v1> of why people upload
> videos to YouTube. They found that contributors are primarily driven by a
> craving for attention. If the videos they upload aren't clicked on, they
> tend to quickly exit the "community." YouTubers view their contributions not
> as pieces of "a digital commons" but as "private goods" that are "paid for
> by attention."
>
> Scott Caplan, a communications professor at the University of Delaware,
> tells New Scientist that studies of social networks generally indicate that
> "people who prefer online social behaviour tend to have higher levels of
> social anxiety and lower social skills."
>
> None of this is particularly surprising. But the findings do lend a darker
> tint to the rose-colored rhetoric that surrounds online communities. A wag
> might suggest that "social production" would be more accurately termed
> "antisocial production."
>
>
> --
> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
> http://p2pfoundation.ning.com
>
> Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens
>
> The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
> http://www.shiftn.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090718/0ac8fa49/attachment.html>