The single person problem

Aug 25, 2008 Alun Digital Academia 1 Comment Education, Phreadz, Seesmic, Social networking, Web 2.0

Is it pos­sible that one per­son just being them­selves could make a social site so unwel­com­ing that you’d avoid recom­mend­ing its use?

This isn’t just about tol­er­ance of trolls. It’s about whether or not social sites are usable in an edu­ca­tional con­text. I’ll give an example.

I’d like to include video on the next Integ­rated Sci­ences web­site. Spe­cific­ally I’d like to be able to include video con­ver­sa­tion, so that people could ask ques­tions and these would appear on site. See­smic would seem to be a good idea for that. Except there’s no way I’d use See­smic because of Under­pants Guy, a man who likes to pon­ti­fic­ate with lib­eral use of swear words in his under­pants. There’s plenty of him to see. Now sup­pose this self-proclaimed troll moves into this con­ver­sa­tion thread, what can be done? On See­smic, noth­ing. Even if there could be, I’m not sure that flag­ging his com­ments for being inap­pro­pri­ate for an edu­ca­tional site would be entirely fair. See­smic is not my site, there­fore I’m not in a pos­i­tion to insist on a dress code or use of lan­guage. It’s a social site. For this reason Phreadz, with its own lib­eral use of lan­guage isn’t suit­able either.

Phreadz will have the option of cre­at­ing a closed site, which would solve the prob­lem. Unfor­tu­nately there’s no way ISciences will be able to afford it, if it’s sens­ibly priced. Also if the site is closed, very few stu­dents will use it. It has to be open and there­fore we have the troll prob­lem again. Again I can’t insist that IScience lays down the beha­viour rules, and with Phreadz being social I think it would be a very bad idea if it did happen.

I’m now think­ing that while fol­low­ing the stu­dents and using the tools they use is a good idea, pro­act­ively lead­ing it opens up too many prob­lems to make sense. There can be grief on Twit­ter or Face­book, but if it’s some­where where the stu­dents are lead­ing then per­haps that’s less of a problem.

*While flag­ging him for use of lan­guage for purely social reas­ons would be no prob­lem at all. I sus­pect if that actu­ally happened many social sites would col­lapse under the admin strain.

Photo of pants (cc) ZeeP­ack.