For this assignment I decided to look at a forum that I have been a part of for a very long time. I am a soccer fan and since soccer isn’t as popular in the States as in other countries, it is hard to get the information you want or discuss certain events. Around 2003 I joined a forum called BigSoccer, which had many discussion boards organized into continents, countries, etc. There I found a good place to talk about the sport and at the same time keep informed of the latest occurrences.
When I first joined, there was a surprising amount of flaming, mainly racist and offensive posts all over the boards. These were mostly attributed to a couple of people who were known trolls. Over time people began to take more and more offense to the racist posts and as the website grew in popularity it was obvious something had to be done. There was a “World Rivalries” sub-forum in which a lot of this behavior occurred. The moderators of the website decided to do a better job at cleaning up the forums and starting enforcing new rules. They were able to delete a lot of the offensive posts and they now respond quickly to posts that are offensive in nature. They allowed the “World Rivalries” forum to survive, and people might find offensive content in this sub-forum even today, but it is not as bad as it was before. This sub-forum also has a description of “home of the dumbest post threads” and a special set of rules which can be found here: http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=414356.
When people join the forum, they are presented with the terms of service which clearly states “By clicking the Agree button, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-orientated, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws.” Violators of this rule will sometimes be given a yellow card, which like in soccer serves as a warning. Everyone in the forum can see who has a yellow card, though they might not know the exact reason for it. After a yellow card comes a red card which means that the user has been banned from the website. The moderators serve as the leviathan in this case. There are many moderators in BigSoccer, each controlling a set of sub-forums, for example each country in South America has their own moderator. The moderators are in charge of enforcing these rules, but from what I’ve seen rules aren’t enforced equally across all sub-forums. For example, a comment that might be deleted immediately in a US sub-forum because of racism, might not be deleted in a sub-forum of some Latin American or European countries. This might be because each sub-forum has it’s own community who might be more tolerant of racism, and also because a post might contain both English and another language which the less tolerant people might not be able to understand.
We can see that many communities have formed in the BigSoccer website due to the concept of groupness that Wallace talks about. She mentions information seeking as one of the causes of groupness and also a common interest. Everyone at BigSoccer has soccer as their common interest and is seeking information about the sport, there are also other things like nationality and language that people can group by. This has resulted in different communities forming which might enforce the rules of the website in different ways. We can also see conformity in BigSoccer, at first the forum was filled with racist posts, but as the website grew, people decided to not tolerate it anymore. The website changed drastically and now anyone who is a known racist is usually looked down upon. If the behavior continues the person will be penalized by the moderators. Both of these are examples of the “arched brow” that Wallace talks about, where members of the community take action against rule breakers. Finally, we can also observe many “signs on the door” which are the rules you see before you enter a space online. For example, we see that the website has a Terms of Service agreement and also posting rules. Furthermore, the description of the World Rivalries forum and its special rules serve as a warning to people who decide to look through them.
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2 comments:
It's interesting that you bring up the disclaimer that you have to accept or decline with you join the forums. We all just push accept or yes to those so often and never read them. For most people I'm sure it wouldn't effect our behavior in a CMC community if it didn't exist, but do you think it deters people who want to behave that way? It gives the moderators the authority to remove their post, but I wonder if it actually lessens the number of post.
I thought you touched on a very important issue when you mentioned that different groups have varying levels of tolerance. This is largely a question of cultural views since some areas of the world are more concerned with being politically correct than others. I wonder if the intensity of the fans' passion for their respective teams influences the likelihood of offensive posts. I would think that people who care more about their team would be more inclined to insult other teams/fans but also tolerate more abuse from others.
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