Feasting on the web’s conviviality

Conviviality – the state of being convivial, occupied with feasting from late Latin convivialis derived from convivium banquet, from com- + vivere to live.

We’re all in this together right, feasting at the same table? Well, some people aren’t as most of us well know after two decades on the net. There are spammers, of course. Those people and organizations that send out junk email or leave inane comments with a string of links to peurile products on blogs and forums. There are trolls, the folks who see their purpose in life to make wicked remarks in discussion groups simply to stir up trouble.

There are phishers of men (and women and kids), the scammers and con artists who lure the unsuspecting into clicking links that lead to malicious websites to steal passwords and bank details. Then there are misanthropic virus writers who believe they’re showing the world how clever they are in the criminal Trojanistas who deposit digital traps on your desktop.

So, how can we talk of conviviality on the Internet? Well, there are all those powerful communities to consider, the Twitters and Facebooks, the Bebos and LinkedIns where, on the whole, members are there for mutual benefit. The majority either lurk silently or get involved in a positive way to help others and themselves. One good turn…and all that.

Computer scientist Patrice Caire of the University of Luxembourg, states that conviviality has been widely defined as “individual freedom realised in personal interdependence”, “rational and cooperative behaviour” and as a “normative instrument”, researchers in computer science have until recently not considered the term seriously.

Conviviality, says Caire, is usually considered a positive concept related to sociability. It leads to social cohesion, trust and participation.

However, if conviviality becomes an instrument of power relations, its darker side emerges. Whereas we all, with the exception of the spammers and scammers, like “to do unto others as we’d have done unto us”, even in a gregarious web community, hierarchies emerge and individuals each have their own morals and aims that might very well conflict with those of others. Diversity issues, privacy concerns and ethical problems all come to the fore despite the best of intentions of community owners and community members.

It is not necessarily that those individuals set out to be non-convivial, it simply arises because of human behavior. To mix a metaphor or two, cyberspace is a dog eat dog world even for those who hate spam and never go phishing regardless of whose table it is that you the feast.

Patrice Caire (2010). How to import the concept of conviviality to web communities Int. J. Web Based Communities, 6 (1), 99-113