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September 30, 2004
Norah Jonestown: A cautionary tale
Posted by David Weinberger
Bill McCloskey tells how Blue Note Records managed to destroy a loyal community of customers and fans - with a little help from the community itself - by not recognizing the community’s value. In short, there had been an active, dedicated discussion group for years around the jazz label’s offerings. But when Norah Jones became the label’s biggest hit performer, the group grew resentful, possibly in part because Norah forgot to have a penis. Because of Jones’ success, new people came to the list where they read that, according to the commuity’s most vocal participants, Jones sucks. So, Blue Note stripped out tons of posts, including ones that they thought were off topic, although they in fact were the sign that the discussion board had become a community. And it gets worse from there.
It’s an interesting study in what John Clippinger calls “social physics.”
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1. Ben Hyde on October 1, 2004 8:58 AM writes...
mr. self writes "penis"!
Of all the big super-dilectics I think that one's probably the least useful in thinking about that story. As soon as a us/them argument shows up you can trot out all the usual super-dialectics. weak/powerful, centralized/collaborative, etc. etc.
It bothers me most because it distracts from what interest _me_!
Communities rendezvous around common cause; for healthy ones this the work of the community. Communities become unhealthy when they get all focused on shunning and them/us boundary creation.
That story is interesting to me because the communities common cause - interest in a kind of music - was threatened by the arrival of a crowd of new folks who wanted to work on something else - another kind of music.
The interesting puzzle is what is a community to do in such a situation? Redesigning the boundaries and recognizing the common causes is certainly part of the solution. Reducing the dispute to one of the super-dialectics is very unlikely to help.
That the 'owner' of the space decided to resolve the resulting dispute by fiat is dumb; but typical. Question though? If the owner had broken the community into two, again by fiat, would that be bad?
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