It is can be hugs tiem now, yes.

[alexr_rwx]

Not long ago, Esther eponis brought to my attention the notion of "ticky", which is apparently a cultural trope in the fandom world, maybe particularly on LJ. It's a tendency to use check-boxes in your web surveys. It's interesting how there are little social norms in different communities -- check-boxes, at least on the surface, don't immediately have anything to do with fandom or fanfic or anything else, right? And I was struck by how much social sciences work could be done on online communities, and how little of it is actually getting done -- or if it is, it's well under my radar.

But. Xeni, on BoingBoing, has pointed out David McRaney's social-sciences-style overview of the LOLcats/image-macros community thing.

Anil Dash, internet culture maven and Six Apart VP, has writted u an articles about LOLcats grammah. (but I eated it)

And. Mr. Gordon McNaughton of Chelmsford, Essex, has produced a LOLcat builder that lets you LOL nearly effortlessly. This sort of tool, it would seem, encourages the continuation of the status quo in LOLcats... innovations in the field may still have to come through some more general image-manipulation program.

Speaking of online communities, though -- what really really baffles me is the comments on the xkcd syndication. xkcd is this beautiful, erudite, subtle thing ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language") with jokes about Fourier transforms, self-reference, and the subversion of language... and the comments on the feed seem inane: "FIRST POST!" or "I don't get it" or "I laughed!". Is there something about xkcd particularly, or is it more a culture of webcomics feeds on LJ? Value judgements aside, I think we should try to make sense of this phenomenon...

Comments

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Maybe perhaps true! But I think it's a bit of an oversimplification...

In a lot of cases, though, there's a community getting built, and even if your real-life identity isn't associated with your online one, there's still some sort of persona that people can identify and think about...

As a tiny tiny example, some people occasionally comment on the BBC news feed, and I recognize them by username at least -- they build up a reputation, and one gets an idea of their political leanings and relative cleverness...

[schizobovine.livejournal.com]

I was going for the "someone else said my idea better than I could" but since it IS a comic strip, it's going to be an oversimplification.

And you're quite right that some people DO care about their online reputations, even if there is no conncetion to meat-space. Still, the capability that some random heckler can post stupid shit ("first post", trolling, etc.) means that without some kind of filtering mechanism, you're still going to get this behavior in any population of a large enough size.

Perhaps the social stigma from posting crap on LJ for big feeds is less, because, a) people don't expect insightful commentery without moderation anyway, and b) because the connection between the smaller cliques of which the individual LJ first poster is part and the larger pool of people that view the feed are almost disjoint. Argument a is mostly due to the feed coming well after the comic, so it's original distribution point for many people was not the feed so a culture of commentary couldn't be built up.