Comment by tokenadult
14 years ago
From the article: "In Academia, high school students have to fight to become undergraduates. Undergraduates have to fight to become PhD candidates. PhD candidates have to fight to become adjuncts. Adjuncts have to fight to become tenured and tenured professors have to fight to become Dean. I can’t even think of a single online community that bears even the slightest resemblance to this sort of power structure."
Interesting point. Maybe having forms of recognition that are demonstrably difficult to achieve does help outstanding contributors feel more like staying.
While I'm academic and more positive on it than some of the sentiment around here is, that actually seems like one of the biggest downsides of academia. It at least partly selects for careerists/game-players/CV-padders over experimenters/thinkers (doubly so for anyone whose goal is to become Dean). Lots of smart people end up burning out or going elsewhere, and many of the rest have a lot of their time taken up learning not-very-interesting things, like how to negotiate the web of prestige, publication, and funding agencies in their field. To the extent it works, I think it's despite all the hierarchy, not because of it.
This is a good point. I generally like the “show us the code” method of social proof in open source communities much more than the “show us your certifications” method in academia. The problem of course is that the latter is much easier to scale up, because the certification stands in for a close and careful examination of each person... “Oh, he graduated from X school? he’s probably alright” is much faster than “Let me spend a few hours reading a major piece of work.”
It’s interesting to wonder whether how you’d go about building communities for doing science in a way that had tasks for inexpert but hard-working/bright newcomers to get started on, and allowed building reputation without all of the hassles of degrees and academic politics where much of the effort is misdirected. I wonder when/if some of the methods and norms of online communities will begin to supplant those of academia as it is today.
Interestingly, when it was smaller, science used to be much more accessible in this way. Once you were literate, you’d passed enough of a bar for serious people to treat you with some respect, and all kinds of advances were made by amateurs. So are the more open systems in computing just because of the youth of the field, or does online communication allow amateurism to scale further than it used to?
I overemphasized the fighting element in the system and neglected to mention that each of these classes have very specific roles in the ecosystem and that they mesh together in a (sometimes healthy) symbiotic way to form the social structure that is the university.
Or alternatively, if there is some sort of power structure that is difficult to move through, people don't bother because there are other places for them to go that don't require as much effort.
Right, you need some kind of happy medium (not too easy, not too difficult).
Why would anyone engaging in an online community want to partake of an elitist "power structure". Okay, other than power junkies whose world is embedded in this kind of delusional existence.
Most folk don't want that insidious role-playing in real life. Online they can just walk away. So that would be why it doesn't exist.
In the real world, we take these elitist power structures for granted. Corporations, Politics, Churches, PTAs, they all unthinkingly replicate a power structure as they grow.
What's interesting to me is that this same pattern appears not to apply to the web.
Indeed, and it may incentivize and motivate them to do things they might not otherwise have done within the community.