I find the way in which communities self-organise totally fascinating – almost as fascinating as I find those situations where communities fail to self-organise. I always wonder what went wrong?, when really I should be asking what went right in the successful communities. It’s not at all an obvious thing that if you give people a highly structured space which truncates whole swathes of interactions that they’ll all turn into a utopian group of productive, collaborative citizens…
On Barbelith Underground – a community that I’ve been running for years now (with development help from Cal Henderson), we decided to allow everyone to change their displayed user-name as and when they wanted. Obviously confusion emerged initially as unhelpful people changed their handles at the drop of a penny. But gradually a consensus emerged – core identities became acknowledged but with florid epithets all around them. So a man who started as Tannhauser moves towards Haus as his core identity, with his name displayed on the board as (currently) The little Haus in the Priory. Each user seems to find a phrase that they identity with (in time), but then they recontextualise it as and when they want…
In Ancient Greek poetry, poets used epithets to make names fit the metrical patterns they composed within. So Hera became “White-Armed” in one place, and “Ox-eyed” elsewhere. Dawn (Eos), when she appears over the battelfield can be – but does not need to be – rododaktylos (rosy-fingered). These were stock-phrases, but they were also highly descriptive. Sometimes they reflected local variations in cultic origins or stories. But they all represented interesting and different facets of the divinity, hero or commoner…
If I was building Barbelith again, I wouldn’t recommend totally flexible displayed-user-names. But I’d want to capture some of the variety and richness of the world of the epithet. I’d get people to express a core identity (Haus, for example) from the beginning, but I’d also let them change their epithets (before and after their names) on the fly as and when they wanted to… It’s a simple way with members of a long-standing community – to pay respect to the way that human beings (over time) can be many things and yet also always themselves…