Continuing work on the Artifact.
Well, I did get a Discord bot stood up, along with my Telegram bot… and once I created a Telegram group and a Discord server and added the bots to their respective groups, I was also able to finish the setup of TediCross and cross-post between the two services. That’s a success!
Dr. Dron had some office hours this week. I’m glad I decided to attend the first one–I had fully intended to visit the last one as well, but I had overlooked a time collision there. If I hadn’t gone to the first office hour, I would have missed out entirely.
And that turned out to be really important. We’ve heard the phrase several times this term, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” (Churchill, 1943). I don’t recall whether it was this exact quote or a derivative that sparked a new thought for me this time… but the thought occurred to me that this is notably true for the community that I have in mind while building the Artifact.
Specifically, the community left another service, Slack, because certain individuals felt it was too ordered. The community was closely divided at the time, and I had originally managed to convince them of the benefits of remaining within an ordered environment while I was “managing” the community directly, but it was still a very narrow thing between the people who wanted to use the tool to collaborate and the people who disliked the tool because they wanted to keep all their socializing in one service (Telegram, in this particular locale).
Of course, once I was no longer “managing” that community, things changed. More to the point, I was replaced by the person who was leading the push to dump Slack (and all the “old ways” and “outsiders”) from the community. This they accomplished.
Anyways, it struck me that what happened was essentially a reshaping of the community to suit that particular person. Said person is no longer “managing” the community, but the legacy lives on. And while I have identified the current problems, confirmed via research that my instincts about a more effective team communication structure seem to be heading in the right direction, and even built out a theoretical, proposed solution to help the community transition into that better direction… I never stopped to delve deeply into precisely why they moved away from structured communication in the first place–or, even more importantly, why so many members of the community followed without complaint. Because there’s no point building something better if the community, as a whole, will not choose something better.
So. What did people gain by leaving a structured communication environment and going to a service where the communication was more opaque and confusing to deal with? What was the attraction? In fairness, there were probably several. I don’t deny that, for a lot of people, there’s a lot of convenience in being able to keep business and socialization in the same place. I don’t think it’s great, but so what? One of the biggest complaints about Slack was that it felt too “business-like.” And… that’s also where the complaints–from the community, at least–ended.
But what about the main person who was pushing to move things to Telegram? They happen to be a recognized narcissist, going so far as to refer to themselves as the emperor (!) of the entire city. And they take special pride in always being involved in everything they feel is even remotely important, taking any changes that might affect their access at any point in the future entirely personally. To this person, moving everything to Telegram is a huge benefit–if they are the only person in all the groups, that gives them greater information control and greater leverage in the group. (You could argue that would have the potential to increase their social capital as well, but everybody also knows the person cannot be trusted. With the one exception that they will always reliably do whatever benefits their ego the most, regardless of cost to anybody else.) The chaos personally benefits them, to the detriment of the community as a whole.
I did a bit of research on this, hunting down articles about narcissism and chaos. That was not entirely useful–I did find an article describing a “network model” of how narcissistic personalities may respond to social media conversations, but judged it ill-related to the current question. I also found Mazella’s essay about narcissistic personalities and chaos. While useful from a psychology standpoint, it didn’t tell me anything specific about how this might influence the community, or why the community might choose to follow them into a less productive, less resilient style of communication.
Eventually, however, I also came across Gruda et al.’s work on leader narcissism and follower engagement. This looks to be a solid, in-depth assessment of what traits in followers might predict greater engagement with narcissistic leaders, and that’s pretty nearly exactly what I’m hunting for. Specifically, they’ve shown that follower agreeableness and neuroticism are positively correlated with narcissistic leader interaction, while follower conscientiousness was negatively correlated and extroversion did not seem to be correlated. There’s also an effect of popularity (or perceived popularity), where the correlations are all stronger for more “popular” narcissistic leaders.
This, then, is a key that I was missing. Many people in this community are highly agreeable and want to avoid conflict. There’s also a relatively high degree of neuroticism (and also, a relatively low to moderate degree of conscientiousness–many people seem to only do things when it’s personally convenient for them). These are all attributes which correlate with greater engagement with a narcissistic leader! Far from being incomprehensible or somehow a mere error in judgement, the members of this community were already primed to follow the narcissistic leader into a more chaotic environment that personally benefited him and him alone. And that’s not something I had identified before.
So how does this change the Artifact, if at all? I’m not entirely sure that it changes anything, per se. But my perspective on it has certainly shifted. Absent “managerial direction” from a leader in the community, many people are likely to stay in the existing system, with or without a TediCross bot. But… hmm, how do I put this?
I identified a major drawback to people trying to enter Discord–without managerial input, everything of value stays in Telegram. By nullifying this drawback, I hoped that the “better system” of structured communication present in Discord would essentially be able to assert itself over time and become the preference of the community. But perhaps that was misguided of me. It is necessary to nullify that drawback, but not sufficient. Yes, people could then use Discord and enjoy the benefits… but the majority of the community’s members will clearly choose chaos willingly, if it means following a “strong” or “popular” leader. A technological measure cannot solve that conundrum alone.
And this, then, takes me back to an idea I had in Week 4, that of a “senior cadre.” At the time, I was thinking of it in terms of normalizing different viewpoints within a community in a non-threatening, even encouraging manner. If I borrow from my own idea, I now think that fostering such a group of respected “senior” members of the community, openly encouraging people to use whatever tool is most comfortable, might provide the missing component. Even absent a clear signal from the leader in any given situation, creating and reinforcing a norm of “use what you like, there’s no judgement about what’s ‘right’ or ‘allowed’, even us senior folks use a mix–some of us use Discord, others use Telegram, and we all work together in harmony anyway” may, through example, encourage some people to stick with whatever tool they feel is best. For some, that might be the chaotic-but-convenient option of Telegram. For some, that might be the more-organized option of Discord. But it will take social, person-to-person normalization to make that freedom of choice acceptable to the community as a whole.
At least, that’s what I think now.
References:
Gruda, D., Karanatsiou, D., Hanges, P., Golbeck, J., & Vakali, A. (2022). Don’t go chasing narcissists: A relational-based and multiverse perspective on leader narcissism and follower engagement using a machine learning approach. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(7), 1130-1147. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221094976
Mazella, A. (n.d.). The need for conflict: The psychology behind chaos and conflict. DRMAZELLA.COM. https://www.drmazzella.com/the-need-for-conflict-the-psychology-behind-chaos-and-conflict/
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