Comments on: Content vs. community: Which will rule?

By: shel israel

shel israel — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:58:27 +0000

Todd, I have no recollection what I said at the beginning of this debate, but it seemstome you are right about chickens & eggs and Francois is right about fruits & meteorological elements. You cannot have a terrestrial community with dwellings and marketplace, support services, governing bodies, etc. Likewise, as Francois also points out, a community without content has no value for the community members and thus has no value at all.

By: Todd

Todd — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 22:02:28 +0000

Wow, Matt. Thanks. I’ll need to sleep on some of that. But I like what you’re saying about conflict. I’d probably state it a little differently (given, as you know, my binary leanings): underlying and driving consciousness is contrast (as opposed to conflict). Swap out those two terms and what you’re saying still makes sense.

By: Matt Searles

Matt Searles — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:46:35 +0000

As I think of it now, I think the answer probably lys in alchemy, kinda sorta.. If we thought of the nature of experience as.. crystallizations.. Imagine that all experience was made up different combinations of basic elements configured in different ways.. like molecules in matter…

Ask what’s the content of the connection, or what’s the connection of the content..

Underlying and driving consciousness is conflict. Conflict drives consciousness in the same way that it drives the plot in a story. Conflict is like the demand portion of supply and demand in economics. Conflict defines how we value content on a personal level.. It is what we are looking for.. and its the underlying factor in principles of social cohesion.

If a group of people get together, if you were to perform a statistical analysis on the conflicts underlying the consciousness of the component individuals.. you would find that.. in a supply and demand sorta way, this is influencing the hierarchy of the group.. what it cultivates in the group members.. and has everything to do with the group consciousness..

Nietzsche would tell you your will isn’t free, that beneath the surface of what you call your will there’s really many wills vying for the top position.. the dominant will we then identify as “our will.” Morality, for Nietzsche, is a hierarchical ordering of the wills… what drives the hierarchy is quite a bit like the Abraham Maslow stuff.. and ultimately speaks to the question of the conflict.

So consciousness.. thecrystallizations… what we are pulling together.. the face of reality as we experience it.. all comes down to conflict.. and that’s sorta “the connection of the content.” Another words the conflict is driving the crystallizations.

Its as if to say the nature of the material world is chaos and this is the process by which we organize it into a conceptual framework.. a “reality concept” through which we interact with it.

Or that’s some of “Matt’s Social Media philosophy 101″ anyway…

By: francois gossieaux

francois gossieaux — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:39:31 +0000

Hi Todd – thank you for continuing the conversation. I was not arguing between content and community…but instead arguing about the categorization that OPA used.

If the question is community vs content, then the answer is clearly that you cannot have community without content – and that is something that many community managers miss as we found in our research (http://tinyurl.com/6xzdkn) and as I wrote about here (http://tinyurl.com/59a65t).