Welcome Guest Poster Brady Potts, who just put together this post about online communities and collective mourning of Alex Chilton’s death. Brady is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Southern California who studies discourse in the public sphere. He is also the co-editor of The Civic Life of American Religion, and an inveterate music junkie.
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Flags are at half-mast today mourning the death of Alex Chilton, former Box Top, Big Star, producer of The Cramps and Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, and truly eclectic solo artist. It got me thinking about the way people use the internet to collectively mourn the passing of public figures, and how online spaces have developed cultures of their own.
In the comments to a New York Times story about Chilton’s death, you’ll find a variety of comments ranging from brief RIPs to lengthy statements about what Chilton’s music has meant to them. Over at the Onion AV Club, which has a robust-yet-often-snarky commenting culture, you find lengthier, more thoughtful comments that are more like a dialogue between members of the site, as members trade stories, recommend songs to each other, and post links to Chilton’s work. The comments also reveal a shared knowledge of “what kind of place this is and what kind of discussions we tend to have here,” as is the case with “PB,” who writes:
“Seriously, folks……the first person to make a snarky “Who?” comment gets a punch in the mouth.
Not just because this guy was a legend and your ignorance of him should be viewed with pity and disgust. But also because it’s obnoxious and ghoulish.Remember, just because you’re on the internet doesn’t meet you have to say something.”
“PB” acknowledges the speech norms of the site (“Who?” is a frequent, if contentious, comment regarding cult artists on the site) and, given the occasion, suggests that the usual sarcasm would be inappropriate.
On the other hand, if you click over to this Chilton tribute song by the Replacements and poke around the comments, you find mostly one or two lines of “RIP” and “You’ll be missed”. This is about par for the course with YouTube, whose commenters seem to favor mostly brief remarks (and, it should be said, often veer into speech that many would find wholly objectionable).
So are the differences in these patterns of commenting evidence of a shared collective identity (“AV Clubber”), as opposed to the more anonymous “anything goes” posting style of YouTube? I think that many observers would agree that it is, but looking at the different sites, there also appears to be a “group style,” what Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman describe as “recurrent patterns of interaction that arise from a group’s shared assumptions about what constitutes good or adequate participation in the group setting.”* Some online spaces we implicitly understand as places for anonymous commentary (with all that entails) while others we recognize as places where one should comment in a certain way, regardless of the identity we may or may not share as visitors to the site. This would suggest that visitors to web sites draw on collective understandings of what it means to be a good commenter in certain kinds of online spaces and post accordingly.
In any case, discussions like these are a starting point for all manner of interesting conversations about how we negotiate interaction online, and for that matter, how we use spaces like these to collectively mourn the passing of public figures whose life’s work is deeply meaningful to many people. And to that end, here are a few of my favorite of Chilton’s tunes, so feel free to use the comments to commemorate his work, wonder what the big deal is, lament the fact that they’ve been missing from your life thus far, or otherwise muse on the uses of the internet.
* Nina Eliasoph & Paul Lichterman, 2003, “Culture in Interaction,” American Journal of Sociology 108(4):737.
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So there’s your late-night Alex Chilton memorial post and rumination on the creation and maintenance of online communal identities. For a somewhat different example, see Jay Smooth’s discussion of people mourning Michael Jackson’s death.
Comments 14
DragonRidingSorceress — March 18, 2010
I think it has something to do with the target audience of a site, as well. A site like this one, for example, has an audience of intelligent, interested readers, which encourages better thought out comments which discuss the topic at hand. Youtube, on the other hand, has a target audience of 'everyone', which includes the subset of 'people who would film a school brawl/robbery/etc and post it online', and of course, 'people who would watch a filmed school brawl/robbery/etc'. Not that I have anything against Youtube, I'm just pointing out that these are some of the people who use it.
Roy Rhodes — March 18, 2010
Re: site content and audience. What I find fascinating about Youtube's "everyone" audience is that the comments dialogue is overwhelmingly vitriolic and not really representative of the audience. And it doesn't seem as if the content of the video really matters. Youtube's comments boards seem to signal to many people the very worst of that sort of dialogue that occurs when everyone posting is anonymous. Why? Why is it that when I see a cool video, I refuse to post any comments simply because it's on Youtube? What sites are safe to post comments on, and which aren't?
It makes sense that sites like this engender discussion and dialogue because 1) the content is such that it sparks dialogue and 2) snarkiness just isn't accepted or cool. So different spheres of the internet seem to be creating community expectation (sometimes unintentionally, as per Youtube).
Fascinating article; thanks for posting it.
KarenS — March 18, 2010
I visit youtube often, but I don't go there to have a conversation, or to read comments on vids. It's far more common for me to be having or reading a discussion on another site (or in private email), go to youtube to watch the vid, then return to the original site to continue the conversation.
This is different from how I use sites like Digg, or certain LiveJournal communities. I'll visit Digg occasionally to see what their members are talking about, but won't participate in their conversations. I follow several LiveJournal communities both for content and to see the members' opinions of the content. When it comes to YouTube, I'm not interested in their comments at all.
Sarah — March 18, 2010
These rules and observations could be applied beyond the realm of collective mourning. In general, the internet and all the behaviors its various portals engender is just (just being a word that does not do it justice) a microcosm or reflection of the "real" world. I have a different personality at work, and tailor my speech accordingly, than I do at the grocery store or at a nightclub. Same goes for the internet -- I comment differently here than I do on my sister's Facebook pictures of her chill'uns.
What's interesting is how these rules get made. What makes commenters decide to be snarky or supportive absent any formal rules? Is it subject-matter based, or just the personalities of people who visit certain sites?
Brady — March 18, 2010
These are all excellent points and yes, the content of the page/vided/whatever is being commented on has a lot to do with it - not just in terms of "what kind of video" is it, for example, but also "what kind of occasion is this?". And it certainly applies beyond occasions like mourning.
On the other hand, just working straight from the content gets tricky because where do you draw those lines? (Like, for instance, this blog is about sociology but the way people interact comment section is very distinct from a lot of other sociology blogs I read...)
As for where those rules come from...whooboy, that's a whole 'nother post. Given that certain types of commenting styles recur across various diverse types of subject matter, my hunch is that it's more that we've developed styles of interaction for online discussions and people, learning to use the net, get a sense of them. (Socialization being an ongoing thing and all.)
Brady — March 18, 2010
Er, that should be "video" not "vided" above.
KD — March 18, 2010
I've noticed that one of the biggest deciding factors in the construction of online communities is the ratio of men and women in the community. Male majority and female majority communities are different. Always. Generalizing, I'd say that female communities are overall more supportive, relationship based, and sensitive to the needs of its members, while male communities are more violent and work towards tearing down its members rather than supporting them; the friendlier male communities are those that band together to tear down outside groups. Now, that's not always true, but I think it characterizes most of the internet communities I've witnessed. The interesting thing is that other factors seem to be subordinate to gender. These characteristics are generally true no matter the education level of the members, or the purpose of the site. Even within a small subculture, I've seen mens sites and womens sites centered around the same subject that operate radically differently because of the gender of their user base. I've even seen sites with male administrators that implement harsh, anti-helpful policies that the female majority members ignore as much as possible because they want to be helpful to others, as well as female admins that try to keep up with a male majority tearing up their friendly rules.
These are generalizations. I've seen snarky, ill-tempered women, though not an ill-tempered female majority. I've seen respectful male posters, but never a respectful male majority. The most respectful male majorities are still exclusive, following a male centered view of the world: they believe they represent everyone, so outside (non-male, usually non-white) views are dismissed. On the other hand, I've seen communities composed of intelligent women that don't speak their mind enough out of fear of being found offensive, dragging the overall usefulness of the site down.
This is a subject that's fascinated me ever since I first started using the internet 10 years ago, found female online spaces and subsequently realized that most of the spaces I'd considered neutral were actually male.
Chilton « NO NOTES — March 21, 2010
[...] 20, 2010 by nonotes Well quite an outpouring online to the surprising and sad death of Alex Chilton. This is no surprise, as it was one of those cases [...]