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7. Contested Boundaries MIT Press on COVID-19 • The Social Machine 7. Contested Boundaries Published on: Apr 27, 2020 Updated on: Apr 28, 2020 MIT Press on COVID-19 • The Social Machine 7. Contested Boundaries In the face-to-face world, one of the primary jobs of any architect or planner is to create boundaries. Physical barriers, such as buildings and walls, along with social and legal norms, determine who can gain admittance at each door. The exterior walls of a home separate a family’s private space from the external public world; its interior rooms bound different functions. Doors allow passage between one space and another, while locks on doors ensure that unwelcome visitors do not enter, yet permit the key-holders to come and go at will. Invited guests can enter at specific times; once in the house, they abide by other rules about which rooms they are welcome to visit and which are private, out of their view. The guest who is rifling through the upstairs bathroom’s medicine cabinet or a bedside table is out of bounds. The boundaries of the home also keep people in: small children are forbidden to venture forth on their own; freedom to come and go is part of the passage toward adulthood. The boundaries vary with time: a cat-sitter may let herself in at certain times, but would be an illegal invader if she entered at others. Our sense of comfort and belonging within our society depends on whether we feel our home—our basic personal space—is safe from intrusion. If only the inhabitants and invited guests enter, we have sovereignty over our space. If others are likely to intrude, whether burglars or police armed with complaints or warrants, we live on edge. Barred windows and heavily dead-bolted doors signal society’s failure to maintain order. And to live in fear that authorities will enter one’s home, whether because one is a dissident in a repressive society or a criminal in a lawful one, is to be alienated from that society. Hi, I really don’t mean to inconvenience you right now but i made a quick trip to London,UK this past weekend and had my bag stolen from me in which contains my passport and credit cards. It happened real fast leaving me document less & penniless right now. I’ve been to the US embassy and they’re willing to help me fly without passport but I just have to pay for the ticket and settle the Hotel bills i resided at. Right now I’m out of cash plus i can’t access my bank without my credit card here, I’ve made contact with them but they need more verification which could take more time for me wait. I was thinking of asking you to lend me some funds now and I’ll give back as soon as I get home. I need to get on the next available flight. Please reply as soon as you can if you are alright with this so i can forward the details as to where to send the funds. You can reach me via email or May field hotel’s desk phone, the numbers are, 011447024043675 or 011447024051751 or instant msg me: [email protected] I await your response… Infrastructural boundaries such as walls and doors neatly divide inside from outside, while complex and often unspoken norms create the social boundaries. Once at home, we are exempt from some (but not all) the laws and mores of the public sphere. One may not walk naked down the street, but can do 2 MIT Press on COVID-19 • The Social Machine 7. Contested Boundaries so at home—yet not when casual acquaintances are visiting, especially children. One may look to the government to provide order in public, but see it as an intrusion when it reaches into the home. Our daily interactions involve negotiating many invisible social boundaries. Some are constructed through politeness. In a restaurant, we act as if there were walls around the other tables, neither making eye contact with people seated elsewhere nor interjecting comments into their conversation. Here there is no physical wall, but a boundary nonetheless. These invisible boundaries govern our public spaces, regulating how we move, speak, and look. Everyone is allowed to be out in public, with the caveat that you know how to behave; those who transgress may be placed in jail, putting a physical boundary between them and the public world. Boundaries protect us, but they also impede us. Where are the boundaries online, and what are they made of? Although the online world is not physical, it also has both infrastructure boundaries and socially constructed boundaries.1 The infrastructure boundaries, its gates and doors, are firewalls, encryption, and private sites. Passwords are the keys to the doors of cyberspace. Like doors, passwords vary from flimsy to fanatically secure. Also like doors, if what they are protecting is interesting enough, or the thieves are skillful enough, there will be break-ins. There is a continuous stream of news stories about corporate break-ins, malicious hacks, and secrets stolen from military networks. “Cyber war” threatens to be the next battle frontier. On the more mundane side, many of us have gotten emails purporting to be from friends, but which turn out to be spam; the friend’s account was broken into and the identity-thief sent email to lure unsuspecting acquaintances (see sidebar). In the physical realm, some boundaries have a person who checks each potential entrant. Guarding boundaries is the primary responsibility of many jobs: border patrollers, airport security agents, ticket takers, club bouncers, and receptionists in offices, schools, and libraries. Almost any semipublic space has people whose job is to maintain boundaries. Police do this at parades, in public squares, and for motorcades. One way of looking at communities is the extent to which their members feel entitled to and/or responsible for maintaining boundaries. Closed neighborhoods—from a trailer park to a gated suburb—can make outsiders wandering through feel very uncomfortable. The appeal of diverse urban neighborhoods, but occasionally their problem, is that no one feels entitled to turn others away. Online, there are moderators. They are the doormen of discussions, vetting each comment to ensure that it is appropriate. Like the doormen of uptown apartment buildings, they are expensive. If a group that requires a moderator cannot find one, it may close. If the moderator is busy, the discussion flow might be halted as everyone waits days for their postings to pass through. In general, the Net is a very open place. What makes it exciting—and often teetering at the edge of chaos—is that it connects a truly extraordinary number of people. An open discussion site can have participants from all over the globe, of different political, ethical, religious, and cultural beliefs, and with varied educational experiences. Some are seeking to learn, others to be entertained, still others 3 MIT Press on COVID-19 • The Social Machine 7. Contested Boundaries to advance a cause. Some enjoy a constructive debate, some just want light humor, and some find fun in pulling pranks and upending discussions. There are also vast numbers of spammers, disruption professionals who will fill any unprotected space—email account, comment forum, or the like—with ads for cheap drugs and sexual aids, or worse, with stealth programs designed to infect one’s computer and turn it into an unwitting spam server itself. Any discussion needs multiple levels of boundaries. First, there are the boundaries that protect against spam. But once these clearly unwanted bits are kept out (and that itself is a constantly evolving battle), there are still the boundaries of behavior: the ability to keep out individuals and messages that are outside the boundaries of the group’s norms. A group’s culture evolves as it defines these norms and develops strategies to maintain them. In an online community, the key issues are determining whether someone should have access to a space and preventing problem users from repeatedly appearing. The history of online conversation is a history of changing boundaries. It is useful to know, because it turns out that finding the right balance between public and private, being open yet not anarchic, is very important. The history of Usenet in particular provides a dramatic example of how societal and technological changes affected the boundaries in one very large community. Online, boundaries are not a matter of putting up fencing, but of defining how we recognize who can participate, what material is acceptable, and how openly available it should be. Today, there are various approaches to this issue: some sites focus on content, employing teams of moderators to vet contributions; others endeavor to establish a reliable community by rewarding highly regarded participants. Some are self-governed; others are managed by the site operators. There are sites whose goal is to create a definitive knowledge repository, to motivate renegade activists, or to be a supportive healing environment. We will look at what constitutes boundaries online, and how the choice of different types of bounds shapes the community. Ultimately, the key to a thriving community is maintaining boundaries that allow new people and ideas in while maintaining a sustainable scale and focus. Boundaries Online: The Rise and Fall of Usenet Computers were invented to be calculating machines for performing mathematical feats. Yet, when people started sharing computers in the 1960s, they also started using them as a social medium, leaving notes and messages to each other on the shared file system. Time-shared computing resources became the social focus for groups of researchers who otherwise might not have met (Licklider and Taylor 1968).
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