Reintroducing the Standard Deviant: It's the Internet, Stupid.

My name is Unimportant, I will be your non-standard deviant for the day.

There are two ways to look at any community. One is from within the community, and one is from without the community - and the fuzzy area that separates the two are always where contention lies. Consider this statement:

...Before you build a community, know what you hope to get out of it...

'Before you build a community'. This is a perspective of people who think communities need to be built, and in this context it's related to public relations and marketing, two things which some people generally don't like - including me - but why do I dislike it? What is it about such things which makes my pupils constrict? It's quite simple: I do not like that people think that I am an orange to be squeezed to produce juice for them to drink (though Freud might disagree).

The article which I pulled that quote from is about using online communities to market. 'Leveraging Online Communities' isn't a bad article, and I won't say it was written by a bad person. But what is annoying about the variations of 'leveraging communities' is that you get a group of people who want to leverage communities being leveraged by their want to... yes, leverage. Somewhere in the mix, the actual human beings involved are filtered out and discarded as so much bagasse. The problem with all of this, of course, is that people are not sugar cane and that they are generally more useful than just producing one item - whereas the methods of analyzing people are usually good at only producing one product. I have noted with increasing alarm that much of the prominent web and blogosphere is dedicated to social marketing - but no one has figured out a way for me to like other people in these artificial communities - and vice versa. These things center around statistically common motivations for doing things, and people typically don't like being statistics unless they are a minority at advantage - which in itself is a statistically common motivation.

Thus, the standard deviant. But here's the thing that most people don't realize when they attempt to create a community based on statistics: By tightening the standard deviation, more people are left outside of the standard deviation. It's simple mathematics. The artificial construct insults the actual construct in this way - and where marketing and public relations tries to tighten the standard deviation, they deny that people are different. The mistake of most marketing, in this lowly non-standard deviant's opinion, is that instead of celebrating the expansion of the standard deviation - they try to focus it. In doing so, they inadvertently dehumanize the very people that they are trying to group together causing a whiplash which can severely damage not just those who are trying to control - but fracture the community itself. And there are those who would profit from those fractures, pressing on the painful spots just to increase circulation. Meanwhile, the people applying pressure and creating fractures simply change names and appearances.

And somewhere in there are the people who make up the community.

Now where did all of this come from? Someone invited me to Yet Another Community Which Promises the World, where the wizard can be clearly seen with the buttons and levers.

It's simple, actually. When television came out in the United States, politicians felt the whiplash when they were used to being able to say one thing in one place and say another thing somewhere else. They couldn't say that people in Iowa sucked while in New Jersey because people in Iowa would see them(fictional instance, there are real instances which I can't recall). Just so with the internet. And all the dehumanizing tripe about community leveraging and squeezing people to make sugar is right here where we can all see it. The 'press releases' don't work as well because we have a direct view of the Wizard manipulating the stage; we know what's going on. We're not stupid, and treating us as stupid creates... a fracture... and then people profit by pressing on the fracture.

And people see it, either immediately or eventually. So some people get better at obfuscating through words, misting issues instead of dealing with the reality so that - statistically -

People are always caught between wanting to be a part of something greater than themselves and being an individual. However, creating something that seems like something greater only reinstills the need for individuality for a balance; it's seen throughout nature.

Now, if you can find something that is truly a 'greater than the sum'... why would you need to market it? Everyone lies. It's not the quality of the lies or exaggeration, it's the reason for these lies and exaggeration which is important.

If you have to create a community around a product/service, your product/service doesn't deserve a community. Societal bubbles and economic bubbles (much one and the same) eventually burst. Why would anyone give anyone the keys to a community so it could be stripmined? Why would anyone wish to stripmine a community?

But if you want to facilitate the community, you might have something.

So no- leave me out of that community you are creating. Facilitate the communities that I am in, and we can talk.

Facilitate, do not build. Spread the word.

Thank you for coming; don't come back, or I shall taunt you a second time.