Forms of Deviance in Online Communities

Seattle.
Well, the final day or AoIR 2011 is upon us, and I’m starting it in a panel on politics. We begin with Fa Martin-Niemi, whose interest is in knowledge-sharing in virtual spaces. Such spaces are filled with social networks, and people act differently as they participate in different social networks – sometimes deviantly to a lesser or greater extent. What are the implications for organisational knowledge spaces in this?

Extreme deviance, of course, is damaging to online social networks; there is also positive deviance, however, which can be beneficial (whistleblowing is one example – such deviance is honourable and voluntary, and oriented to greater norms than just those of the immediate social space).

Fa pursued a three-month virtual ethnographic study of online software developers’ fora; she identified different levels of participation, and different roles played by individual participants. Each level of participation had associated deviances: interpersonal deviance, for example, where people acted ‘lawfully stupid’ by grandstanding, philosophising, acting rudely, or making grandiosely absolute statements; or in-crowd enforcement, where self-appointed group guardians try to enforce perceived group norms. (And these two forms of group deviants are also often picking fights with one another.)

Through these processes, the social norms of the space are exposed, and member roles are clarified. Trust is broken and/or established, and relational (between members) and task-specific (topic-oriented) conflict is introduced – and some such conflict can be beneficial and move the conversation along, too. As a result, reputation is established.

Overall, then, there is a two-dimensional framework: from low to high deviance, and from social to personal motivation for such deviance. Trolls, for example, are highly deviant, self-motivated rule-breakers; other forms of deviance are more beneficial. All of this is important for organisations which aim to strategically incorporate group communication technologies to gain a competitive advantage and drive internal processes; what emerges from this study is that such spaces need to anticipate deviance, and allow for beneficial forms of deviance.