More about Philo activities in SL

I decided to make a quick update to the last blog. Two months is a long time in SL and a lot has happened since. The most important event has been the creation of a new Philosophy Island (PI), a whole sim dedicated to discussions and debating. PI sim was originally created by Lokifluff, but now it is administered by a council of it's residents, who have rented maybe 70 % of the area and and an elected "senate" which oversees the common areas and the activities there. I don't remember the slurl address, but you can find PI easily by typing Philosophy island in the SL map search.

Philosophy Island's common area has camp fire (much like in PH) for ongoing discussions, and there are also lots of scheduled and moderated presentations and speeches. The scheduled events have covered a very wide range of topics, such as Wittgenstein's views on dualism, moral realism, the usefulness of meme hypothesis, Rawl's theory of justice or even the benefits and threats of natiolism and patriotism. Go check the weekly program of events. It can be acquired close to the PI campfire, located roughly at the center of the island.

It will be interesting to see how the activities in PI will develop. Namely one of the big challenges in anonymous discussion forums has been the moderation policy. I have been planning to write an essay about my experiences about hanging in various philosophy discussion forums in the internet and SL since summer 2000 (10 years this summer!). I have noticed that all anonymous philosophy/politics/religion forums tend to undergo a similar kind of evolution from the initial enthusiasm and idealism after the founding of the forum to flame wars and when the interesting discussions bring traffic, to the unavoidable attacks of malicious trolls, spammers and abusive griefers. Then follow the neverending metadisucssion and whining about moderation policy (or the lack of it) and finally the decay of the forum to a boring socializing chat forum, where any attempt to discuss philosophy will be considered as snobbery... It's funny how all the unmoderated or "lightly" moderated forums tend to follow the same phases of evolution. It would seem that the life span of an unmoderated or lightly moderated philo discussion forum is about 2-3 years from the initial enthusiasm, where people spend a lot of time in preparing their contributions to make a serious and interesting discussion to a silly chat room, where the average length of replies is 3-4 words.

Of course the forums with a very tight moderation keep griefers away and the discussions stay focused on the topics that the forum was founded for, but it tends to happen at the cost of livelyhood or the playfulness of the atmostphere. And a tight moderation will definetely consume a lot of resources for the administrator of the site. So in some ways the "heaviness" of moderation will be a choice between quantity of traffic and quality of discussions. Some moderation is usually always needed, because if the atmosphere is let to be too abusive and rotten for too long time, it will lead to all the serious contributors (who I think are the interesting ones) to abandon the forum for good.

Some people are concerned that any moderation whatsoever would restrict the freedom of expression and somehow hinder innovation. That is a of course a valid concern....yet according to my experience from over 10 years in several (officially politically neutral) forums, I cannot say that I had ever encountered a moderation decision where the decision had been based on the political or philosophical content of the opinions that someone has expressed. The moderation decisions have practically always been caused by spamming, verbal abuse or personal attacks that do not relate to the discussions. In practise, the true restricitions to people's freedom to have a conversation with each other have been caused by self centered spammers or hostile trolls.

I do think though that sometimes the moderators have not been fully up to their task. People are very sensitive about the equal treatment and the consistency of the moderation policy. I have seen cases, where a moderator might have favored some type of humor over something else, or given some people special privileges for example in a way that someone's abusive behavior has been overlooked because the person has been a regular for so long, or she/he is moderator's friend. Sometimes there has been even cases where it has looked as if the moderator had wanted to create drama on purpose...A manipulative moderator, yikes!

Usually all the moderators have been appointed by the administrator of the forum, (in SL, by the owner of the sim). However in Philosophy Island the common discussion areas are governed by a senate, which is elected by the members of the PI group, so that the governance would be a representative democracy, with elections every 3 month. It will be interesting to see, how this system will affect the evolution of the discussions and atmosphere! Will the PI common area general discussions follow the same path of evolution than the forums I have seen before, or does the democracy bring different dynamics.

In summary, my experience is that although a clear moderation policy is crucial for a discussion forum to be a hospitable place for people to hang, it almost doesn't matter what type of a moderation there will be, as long as it's logical and consisten. I would even say that when it comes to the freedom of expression, moderation policy has been factually almost a non-issue. Out of all the metadiscussion about moderation, that I have encountered, perhaps 98 % has been nothing but clueless whining and creating drama out of nothing just to annoy the other forum regulars. Not that the remaining 2% hadn't been real issues, but endless whining about moderation has spoiled the atmosphere in so many forums and caused mass escape of everyone who actually wants to discuss about something of substance.

Discussion forums are not about moderation policies, but rather about the people who want spend their time there and the expectations of the administrator: what are the topics she hopes the people would be talking about; is the forum meant for discussion about philosophy, science, knitting, food recipes or mercedes-benz spare parts, or is the purpose of the forum to create a lively theater for drama, abuse noobs and innocent bypassers or facilitate social chit chat...the moderation policy can then be chosen accordingly. Freedom of expression is hardly limited in any case, since the internet is still full of forums where to express any serious opinion whatsoever under a pseudonym. Or with an established SL identity that can be used also out of SL (like in my case). And if the moderation policy of any of the myriad existing forums is still not to one's liking, it's always possible to setup a new one in 5 minutes!

However, now there are true and serious threats to the freedom of expression in SL! Please do take a look at this blog http://whenitchanged.blogspot.com/2010/01/privacy-is-my-right-message-to-linden.html Lauren Jones has been able to point out the hazards of Linden Labs and facebook co-operation better than I could ever have been able.

If we are to be ripped away our anonymity and the possibility to create avatar identities, separate from our "meatspace avatars", it means that our meatspace dependencies will start to affect our ability to express experimental thoughts, innovative ideas not to mention making provocations in search of the hidden truths. If you have seen the trouble to read this writing all the way down here, please do check out Lauren's blog, it's really important for anyone who takes an SL identity even slightly seriously!!!

QS

PS: Lauren is talking about an SL persona that is promoting the full integration of RL and SL personas, with an obvious goal to make money...
Any PI regular reading this: Doesn't this sound a bit familiar ? =)

Q