This is a confluence of several trains of thought -- I know what you're thinking : Is it really a good thing for trains to conflue? : So let's just call them streams of consciousness -- at any rate, we pick up one plot line where the thread "On the Nature and Sources of Expertise" left off, plus another subplot from the discussion that I was trying and failing to get started in the Citizendium Forums on the "Unintended Consequences of the Community Metaphor", and we note some resonance with a project in this Review that is devoted to deconstructing the "Wikipedia Ideology".

I freely confess to having one wikness in common with the Wikipuddlians, and that is my tendency toward acronymania. So when I set to work trying to fathom the most fitting names for their Actual Norms Of Practice, as opposed to their Espoused Norms Of Preaching, I eventually arrived at the following formulas:

• FUCT = Fatally Undermine Critical Thinking
• TSAR = Totally Shirk All Responsibility

Jonny

For future reference --

GIMME = Group Identity Myth, Marking Election

GIMME_1. Group Identity Myth, Mildly Enculcated
GIMME_2. Group Identity Myth, Moderately Entrenched
GIMME_3. Group Identity Myth, Maniacally Enforced

"When trains conflue, people like you conflue too..."

Actually, "Group Identity Myth" is a very good way to express one of WP's main problems, oddly enough. Not only are they seen as a single entity by the outside world (i.e., they're "Wikipedia," not "the various different people who post things on the Wikipedia website), but they seem to encourage their own admins and users to treat the community as a monolithic edifice as well. Groupthink usually forms because there's both safety and power in numbers, especially if everyone is acting in lockstep and not internally criticizing anything of significance. But what happens with Wikipedia is that there's no effective control over people who decide to dissent, and when that happens, everyone freaks out.

But on top of that, many of the individuals who buy into this attitude (or ideology, or whatever) seem to develop this idea that the rest of the internet is the same way, almost as if they can say things like "everyone on LiveJournal says this" or "Digg.com is full of twits" or "everyone on ED is a hate-filled porn spammer," and nobody should question these statements. Sure, they might be right about that last one... but they'd be seen as more rational, and they'd be more popular and respected as a community, if they didn't do that.

One of the more annoying morals of the Thesis On Expertise is that we probably won't be able to see what is really going on here unless we shift our focus a bit. Instead of fixing too fixedly on the bad acts of the individual other, we need to render more visible (1) the fields of forces that pervade the environment, (2) the charges at the nucleus of every particular person that generate their contribution to these fields, and (3) the orbits that the so-charged agents plot through these fields even as they warp them to suit their shapes.

Thus we we are forced, if we want to resolve the organizational dynamics in the direction of more desirable ends, to concern ourselves with the generic facets of the ordinary human persona. To put it another way, we have to consider the so-called universals of our so-called humanity. And the same lesson applies even as we graduate to the Antithesis On Ignorance.

Please don't ask me what the Synthesis is -- I'm making it up as I go.

Jonny

Oh Joy. What the world needs: more acronyms and idiot neologisms

The writer whose nom de panache I flourish and his favorite co-author have previously written on the subject of group identity myths, in connection with certain issues about the way that our educational institutions address the problems of society:

• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (May 2001), "Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities", Organization: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society 8(2), Sage Publications, London, UK, pp. 269–284. Abstract.
• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (September 18, 1999), "Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations: The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century", Second International Conference of the Journal Organization, Re-Organizing Knowledge, Trans-Forming Institutions: Knowing, Knowledge, and the University in the 21st Century, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. Eprint, WayBak.

As a population of individuals begins to cohere into a community, to gel into a group, the process may be catalyzed through the agency of a "Group Identity Myth Marking Election" (GIMME), that is to say, a tale or a text notarizing selection for the elite in question. In this context, a myth is merely a story that is known to all members of the group and that they commonly repeat to each other as a way of telling who is "in the know" and who is not. It's like a story made up entirely of passwords. As such, the myth itself is "beyond good and evil", since its truth or falsity is utterly immaterial to its collusive function.

To be continued ...

Jonny

If you need a timely example of a GIMME, you could hardly do better than to visit the threads that have all down-givvied and just kept ravelling raving on from the clueful rueful instigma of this punctilious point:

• Parker Peters, "Quitting Wikipedia and Wanted You To Know Why", Wikien List, 06 Oct 2006

The truly phenomenal thing about this phenomenon of collective detumessence is just how quickly the group's incessant humming of their all too trite tunes into each other's ears is able to dampen so far as they can hear the nuisant perturbations of that potentially newsome stimulus.

Jonny

I had always meant to get back to the subject of Group Identity Myths, a topic that Susan Awbrey and I touched on in some of our earlier research on Integrative Education and Learning Organizations.

References

• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (September 1999), "Organizations of Learning or Learning Organizations : The Challenge of Creating Integrative Universities for the Next Century", Second International Conference of the Journal 'Organization', Re-Organizing Knowledge, Trans-Forming Institutions : Knowing, Knowledge, and the University in the 21st Century, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA. Eprint.
• Awbrey, S.M., and Awbrey, J.L. (May 2001), "Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities", Organization : The Interdisciplinary Journal of Organization, Theory, and Society 8(2), Sage Publications, London, UK, pp. 269–284. Abstract.

The group identity myth that we examined in this work was one that we dubbed the «Triviality Of Integration» (TOI) thesis. Here is how we introduced the subject in the Abstract of the "Conceptual Barriers" paper from 2001.


Our work examined the effect of the TOI thesis on established institutions of learning, but the same basic assumption lies so deeply embedded in contemporary thought that seldom is heard any questioning of it. More to the immediate purpose, Wikipedia culture buys it hook, line, and sinker, even more devoutly and uncritically than the lion's share of "establishment" educational enterprises on the scene today.

Jon Awbrey

quasi-periodic quantum percolation

jon