mdw
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Why can't fair-witnesses censor items?
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Jan 19 04:51 UTC 1995 |
In another item, someone asked that fair-witnesses be allowed to
responses in one conference. The following is my answer to that. I
found that a proper answer took 64 lines, so to avoid derailing that
item, I've entered this item instead.
The well, for many years, had a policy that fair-witnesses could do
pretty much what they wanted in each cf. The last time I checked in,
about 6 months ago - I was interested to note that their policy had
changed: they now have a policy where any censoring that's done is
supposed to be approved by some central commitee, and woe betide any
fair-witness who censors on his own. Now, I don't know what inspired
this change in their administrative rules, but I am not much surprised.
I'm sure that whatever led them to make this change was both long and
painful, and that more than one person left forever in disgust.
That is a hard lesson for people to learn, because we come upon computer
conferencing as adults. We have been trained from childhood to expect
hierarchical control of groups - "the army system". But that is only
one possible way to organize groups of people, and as the Japanese have
been busy proving to us for the past 30 years, it's not the best
solution. We don't have fairy tales about cooperation - we don't have
video games that teach cooperation - and we grow up in an environment
were we are isolated by TV and school, and taught to on the one hand
unconditionally respect authority "or else", and on the other hand to be
incompatible rugged individualists who respect nothing, not even other
other. We are not taught how to respect and nurture creativity and
origionality in each other, and that's why this is a hard lesson to
learn.
As a program designer, I get to explore some of these issues, in an
almost unique way. I was lucky in not having to start out from scratch,
but instead having the opportunity to benefit from work done by others.
(This is called the "scientific method.") There were many things I
kept, many things I discarded, and several new things I introduced. As
a program designer, I am also an artist. If you pick any detail of the
program, and ask "why" - I'll have a reason, hopefully based on logic.
If you ask "why" again, I'll have a reason for that too. But if you
keep asking "why", and follow the chain of logic back, you'll eventually
come to a "Because". Those are the non-logical "arty" premises I
started with, which have no real rational basis, they just "Are."
One of those funny "arty" things I was trying for, was the kind of
cooperative communicative atmosphere I'd seen in CRLT:Micros way back in
1981. People were exchanging a lot of information, having fun, and with
a minimum of "control" and a maximum of "warm friendlies". Now, it
didn't look like anything special was happening here, and it would be
easy to argue that it was just the people involved, or just luck, and
that it couldn't happen anywhere else. But, as a stubborn artist who
wanted to duplicate and capture that feeling, I wasn't willing to settle
for those answers. So I decided to instead use the scientific method.
In fact, I had a lot of other data to work with, because I could see how
other conferences on MTS worked. I could look at myself and ask, as a
participant, what was influencing my behavior? I could look at local
systems in the area, and ask what was different about them. Also I
could talk to the designers of some of those systems, and find out why
they did certain things, or at least, what happened with what they did.
So, I had a wealth of data to work with, and I came to some pretty
definite design decisions quite early on.
One of those design decisions relates to the very name, "fair-witness".
In Confer (CRLT:Micros), the corresponding person is an "organizer".
There is a very definite sense in Confer that the "organizer" is in
charge of things, starting off with an e-mail message that gets
automatically delivered to you the moment you join. It seemed to me,
that this kind of paternalistic greeting promoted a mind model that
"organizer" = "fascist dictator", so as a program designer, that's one
of the things I wanted to change. Not sending the e-mail message is an
obvious simplification. But I also knew the power of words, and I very
much wanted to find another name for "organizer" that would suggest
something different and much less "controlling", and so I hit upon the
word "fair-witness". It comes from Heinlein, of course, and for
Heinlein, a fair-witness is a person who does nothing but this: observes
the truth, and reports it, exactly as they see it. Nothing more. Very
simple, very passive, and yet, very powerful. In the original version
of PicoSpan, and for some time after that, in fact, the fair-witness had
NO special powers whatsoever.
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