On openness in culture

By Liz Henry | March 27, 2007, 9:43 am | 0 Comments

When I show people wikis for the first time, which I do fairly often as a wiki enthusiast, they often react with a particular set of uncertainties and fears which run very deep. In this framework of thinking, a closed community is a protected community, and openness is cause for panic, or at the least, cause for distrust of the quality of information. In a business context, this translates to businesses needing to know that someone is in control, someone is accountable, for what is written in a wiki. If anyone can write anything, what happens? Will it be seen as representative of the company?

In the ongoing discussion about meankids.org, unclebobisms.com, and Kathy Sierra, I notice a strong thread of anxiety about openness in culture and editorial control. Ross pointed out that we hear more about the problems of being open than we do about the problems of being closed:

Being open on the web matters. Transparency is good. Society values it more every day and it the underlying force field of the blogosphere. But it is rare to hear horror stories of being too closed, and frequent for being open. Maybe being to closed makes you unheard to begin with. Maybe it means isolation which is our greatest fear.

This is a great point. I agree with it on a fundamental level, and that’s one of the reasons I love working for Socialtext.

I’ll go out on a limb here and say that it speaks to me as a feminist in particular. I hear a lot of stories in the media about how I should be afraid to walk on the street at night because strangers might attack me. I don’t hear media stories that outline two important details: that men walking alone at night are more at risk of violence than women, and that women are more at risk of domestic violence than violence from random strangers. Yet our culture promotes the idea that women should be fearful, should enclose themselves for safety, with the end result of isolation and alienation from public culture — whether that means traveling with freedom and independence, or whether it means public discourse on the internet.

But in an open environment, where everyone has access to the means of cultural production, what happens when something goes wrong? In a business wiki, there have to be clear and strong policies that define acceptable behavior, and there should be people willing to act in the role of moderator or editor. On BlogHer, for example, which is an open forum, there is a clear policy that takes a stance against hate speech. Anyone is free to produce content, but the moderators of the site are clearly identified. Because the creator of unclebobisms.com was unwilling to “censor one person” who apparently created the obnoxious and misogynist images of Sierra, he took the entire site down. This strikes me as playing into the culture of closed and controlled information more than one instance of editorial control or negotiation would have done.

In any case, yes, more people producing information and content means more potential problems, more complexity. But it also brings a huge potential good. When we look at Wikipedia, for example, we do see some problems, hoaxes, inaccuracy, vandalism; but I would like to point to the beauty of the really good information, and the good habits of collaboration that are fostered by engagement with Wikipedia. (And, “anarchy” isn’t a bad word; anarchists have process and structure and tools for handling collaboration and consensus. This might sound odd, but business has a lot to learn from political anarchists.) Wikis are an an extremely powerful tool for openness. So were printing presses, and copy machines. We don’t have to be afraid of that power. We can ride it, go with it, harness it, and develop tools to deal with its problems — whether software tools or social and community skills.

In an open environment, we know there’s reason for caution and concern; despite that, we should act and speak without being controlled by fear. I hope it’s clear I’m connecting fear of threats and trolls with the fear of bad quality of information. Before escalating to the degree of closing off an open community, or rejecting the possibility of openness, we can call for *the conscious exercise of editorial judgment*.