Stowe Boyd writes recently about confusion on the nature, scale and “new” etiquette of conversation.

Crucial points of our agreement: “…I maintain that small world ethics will trump big world ethics everytime.” And also: “…the nature of social scale means that the value is tied to smallness, while the publisher mindset wants bigness. As we move to the edge, everything gets small, and those holding to the center want to keep things big.”

I left a comment there, but more seems worth writing down.

First, an interesting observation, which I’m sure is 100% original with me: Groups and communities tend to form and grow dynamically and then shed participants (participants, not followers or watchers or subscribers) at a very particular scale. Might depend on the medium and the frequency of meeting and the importance of the stuff the group attends to, but in general all groups have a Goldilocks size.

That’s no doubt a novel revelation, yes? I so smart. Oh, wait, it does sound a bit like something I heard once in an introductory anthropology course, or maybe it was sociology or public policy, or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fucking common sense.

Well, still. I don’t hear it trotted out very often in my circles. Novel is as novel does.

As Stowe points out, the cultural assumptions and mistakes (here “Big World vs. Small World”) seem to come down to that word I highlighted accidentally up there: “participants”.

Sitting on your ass surfing? Relatively simple. Innocuous activity. We all—all of us—tend to devalue it, denigrate it, consider it a passive low-impact low-benefit time-waster. It’s consumption. It’s consumerism. Guilty pleasure. It’s TV-watching, sitting and nodding in an audience, clicking the clicker. Church. Nurenburg. Stadium concerts. Commercial radio. Bestsellers. Introductory university classes. Mass media pabulum.

Whoops, I wasted the whole day doing mindless _____! Tee hee. Silly me; I’ll do better tomorrow. My Next Work is almost complete; if only I could avoid switching on the _____!

Heed not the fact that we all do it. We all viscerally tend towards liking it, but socially we (the “we” reading and writing here, I bet) don’t really value it very highly. Loads of people like it and think nothing of it, but “we”, well we know better.

Most of “us” don’t own TVs or don’t have cars or don’t belong to a church or only buy local or don’t eat burgers or we walk to work or we eschew “marketroids and suits” like the plague or we’re missionaries or we have organic farms or we seek a Different Path or we write blogs and books or we have Macs (or Linux!) or we’re Not Employees or we live in quirky expensive “smarter” neighborhoods or we play at (of all things) community activism.

Pshaw. We don’t attend meetings, we run them. Collaborative meetings, where everybody “gets to” talk. Meetings where people are expected to get up and contribute something, dammit.

We don’t write articles, we run magazines. We don’t go to lectures, we give them at conferences. We don’t buy CDs, we have studios in our basement. We have easels, and sound mixing boards; we do digital letterpress, and use local ingredients to cook food from cuisines as far away as possible; we design our own houses, in which own servers are running software we wrote ourselves.

All that other stuff? Bah. That’s just sitting around and typing. Listening to the Muzak of the world. Surfing. Being a political sheep, a dupe, a stooge, the easily manipulated raw material of commerce and the octopoid Conservative political machine. What have you done recently? What have you personally written recently? What have you made?

How many useful comments have you left on people’s blogs, how many links to their good stuff?

How have you participated, in other words? Because consuming isn’t participating. It’s not creating if you don’t modify it and pass it along, in kind, enhanced somehow.

That stuff in your head, those unvoiced ideas and vague appreciations, those conversations you have face to face, those enjoyable moments of appreciation? Nothing; worthless. Where have you added beauty to the world? Show us the beauty, dammit. Your nodding smile isn’t good in this town, ya fuckin’ tourist.

Those other people we dismiss? They’re about monetization and mind control. We hate that; it’s greed pure and simple. Old World stuff. Filthy lucre taints the purity of our essence. We don’t do khaki, we don’t do desk jobs, we don’t do commercials. Monetization is crass.

No, we’re all about the utilization. Every click a helpful reference; every link a nugget of affecting amusement, or irony, or distilled advice. You’re not supposed to just stare at it. It’s something you’re supposed to see because it will make you make something wonderful.

U HAZ A KEY. I MADE IT FOR U: This crap I’m typing in my blog, it’s your key to freedom, intelligence, political awareness, action. A better… well, something or other.

You haven’t utilized my work enough if you haven’t jumped in and participated and created something of your own in response. What are you? Have you no Craft, Man? Where’s your authenticity?

So here’s my premise, hyperbole aside: What Stowe calls “big world”, which is a widely-accepted socioeconomic structure that most folks would identify easily as “normal stuff”, is about consumption. The implicit economic agreement is: you consume it, you should reward the producer with some combo of (a) buying something from a subscription or an an ad, (b) further and continued attention in future, (c) did we mention money? Well, maybe you just thank them now and then.

What Stowe calls “small world” — which is “new” in some sense (novel is as novel does) but is in fact what a number of pretentious but influential people in the 19th century (that godawful wordy Ruskin ass, filigreed tubby William Morris, Henry D. Thoreau, some other stupid poets I can’t keep straight [insert hyperlinks!!1!]) invented, that’s about craft. Factories were bad, see; they changed stuff. All those people who used to be just peasants and tradesmen, they became endangered by the Moloch of commerce, the ceaseless mindless inattentive drollery of… well you get it. All that green stuff we used to have, the cow manure, the muddy roads, the thundermugs, overnight replaced by stinking automobiles rolling on pavement, and soul-sucking labor-saving devices.

How horrible it was, to have lost all that local folkloric quaint charming culture in the wash of globalized industrial convenience. Before that, everybody had to do it the hard way, just like in Hobbiton, bless their button noses and fuzzy little feet.

So in response these poets and stuff did what any one of “us” would have done, given their technical limitations: They started small presses, held salons, painted outrageously transgressive works of art involving Catholicism and fairies, and wrote challenging short novels printed in heavy typefaces with a heavy impression on heavy deckled paper. Symbolism is something you’re supposed to use, see.

Note well: they didn’t broadcast, didn’t write essays and letters in magazines (except their own). For chrissakes they didn’t hold public meetings, where just anybody could come along and meander ignorantly on about their personal concerns. No: they chatted amongst themselves. Because of course every valued conversation, every consecutive creative act, that was the empowering seed of the next step towards a proper democratic thoughtful self-governed transcendent panarchic utopia. A practical, efficient economy of fungible creation, each act usefully supporting and reinforcing another’s sensibilities.

Everything important is either creation or criticism. Often both! Folks “pay” for stuff by giving you back stuff in return, as efficiently as possible. You accept (crassly, “consume”) novel beauty, but then if you’re one of “us” you are then expected to create something of beauty in return. If nothing else, by pointing out how cunning and creative we are. You may post a short accolade in the accompanying form.

In practice “in return” means merely giving credit to the source. The original author should be part of the conversation, should be standing right there next to you on the ground, not towering above. Things, designs, they must above all else to be kept on a “human scale”. We hate unsympathetic corporate sprawling international towering monsters where you’re just left unable to respond in kind, an awe-struck consumer. I mean, how is that fair? Don’ have no truck wi’ wizards in thayse parts.

Because if you like something, you’re supposed to reward the creator. Directly, if possible, and in kind.

That’s the implicit social rule, right there: Freedom comes only at the price of authentic participation. And by extension: inauthenticity dilutes freedom. Marketing, advertising, globalization: they are the enemies of freedom because they undermine the crucial human trade in authentic beauty.

So think about Twitter: Is it noise, or fun? Do you post a lot, or do you find it annoyingly “dilute”? What about email? Do you try to diligently reply to every email you get (that’s worthwhile), or do you slack off and just read it, and get around to replying when you have a chance? Facebook? Do you like looking and surfing your network’s gang-sign-throwing photos at Facebook, or do you try to empower communities by setting up groups of like-minded individuals? Do you have a blog of your own, and does anybody care if you are tardy posting useful stuff?

Now, having asked those questions: what makes you think I care?

And, finally. Do I really need to explain the role of “r/K selection” in this context? I mean, it seems kindof lazy for me not to, having promised early on. Or, wait, am I ironically breaking my social contract as an “author” by not following through on promise of my title, and trying to make a point on how you’re empowered, see, to look it up and figure out the neat puzzle all by yourself?

No, really, I’m not sure. That’s not meta-meta. Just meta.

In general, is it an act of laziness if I leave something unexplained and confusing on the Internet? Or am I being “symbolic” and soliciting participatory cunning help from my insider-laden small social world? The people that matter, they get it surely.

Is my del.icio.us feed a boring, mass-consumption piece of crap that means I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to write real useful stuff? Or am I harking back consciously to the day when a “blog” was little more than what you might call a “log of websites”, a kind of personal diary of what I find useful and interesting and think you might as well? Am I being more useful and productive by posting comments and essays in response the ones other people write, or am I being even more meta-creative by posting oblique links without any connecting explanatory mesh? Or do I need to use Arial Black for that and call it a Tumblog?

Hang on, dammit. Am I agreeing with Stowe Boyd, who says that small worlds like “ours” will trump big world designs targeting “the masses” through broadcast and consumption? Or am I questioning his (and my own) assumptions about individuation, about membership in discrete demographics or consistency of behavior, and the fundamental dynamics of social (and business) strategies?

Heavens. Disambiguation needed.

Hell. Don’t ask me. I personally don’t know which side of any of these dichotomies is the right answer. Don’t even know which dichotomy is most important.

By invoking an abstruse metaphor from mathematical ecology in a discussion of social dynamics and business models in the New Ecominny, am I implying something pretentiously ingenious? Or maybe it’s… oh yeah. Fucking common sense.

Or maybe it’s just about history and perspective. Again. Maybe all I ever say is: What makes you think you’re so special?

Comments welcomed!

And remember: Every time you leave something confusing on the Internet, an angel eats a kitten.