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So yesterday, the interwebs were in a brief uproar when it was found that the original Rickrolling video had been taken down for Terms of Use Violation. Google identified the mistake and restored the video, but those handfull of hours during which a major artifact of internet culture was missing revealed some interesting things about our digital media landscape.

It’s not (just) a question of technology

One of the biggest issues brought forth by this takedown (and many other “mistaken” ones likes it, such as Viacom’s “accidental” silencing of racism protest) is that these incidents aren’t just a question of technological oversights. The reveal an industry build on legal and economic structures that refuse to adapt to cultural change. Google’s apology email is full of passive voice — videos are “mistakenly removed” and accounts “mistakenly suspended.” With all the talk of users, flagging systems, it quickly becomes an artful dodging of accountability. It makes it seem like it was a blameless incident, a technological snafu outside anyone’s control.

But it’s important that we don’t mistake “lack of intent” with “lack of culpability.” I don’t really blame Google — their actions are responding to IP policies that equate promoting open source to being a rogue state. As Mike Masnick points out, the problem isn’t that something fell through the cracks of a the tech system in place to identify content violations quickly. The problem is the demands of that kind of speed, the kind of “take down first, ask dodge questions later” attitude that pervades the creative industries.

Technology, and third-parties like Google, are just convenient and blamelessly neutral scapegoats in the real digital divide — the chasm between social use of technologies and industrial control over them.

Takedowns take away more than just content

Another thing that the outcry around the take-down makes us realize is that the video itself is just one part of the cultural artifact. After all, it’s not like we couldn’t still watch a duplicate video on YouTube. But what we lost that was more significant than the video were the comments, the tags, the response links, even the viewcount. The metadata and paratexts that document the significance and development of the cultural phenomenon. The video is just the book cover — the real meat of the story was the record of how people watched it. That was why this particular takedown was so outrageous. What was removed was something infinitely more unique and scarce than some video. What was removed was a rich cultural document that no one should own the IP to.

One man’s culture is another man’s spam

A final interesting aspect is the fact that the takedown wasn’t an IP issue, but a user-flagging issue. Unsurprising, perhaps, because if you’re not in on the joke, a lot of internet memes look pretty much just like spam: incomprehensible and weirdly persistent. What this reveals to us is something that those fighting the high culture/pop culture divide have been reminding us forever: that culture is ultimately wholly subjective and deeply contextual.

Communities are complex social formations with a nuanced system of structures, roles, and behaviors. In the world of brands and corporations, this fact it too often overlooked in favor segmenting communities according to the priorities of the brand. Brands need to know who can help push their agenda amongst the community — communities are segmented into “influencers” and “everybody else.” Or, the oft-referenced “ladder of participation” gets trotted out. Though it has more segments, it nevertheless defines participation according to criteria of activeness.

Of course, who wields influence in a community and which activities (blogging, linking, reading, etc) are common are things that marketers need to know. But if we want to actually act upon this knowledge and influence those influencers, it’s equally important what aspects of a community different types of members influence and how (and why). Similarly, with the ladder of participation, it’s incredibly useful to understand what people do (or don’t do). However, as more and more people are adapting participatory technologies into their lives and communities, it becomes equally important to understand what they’re doing it for.

In short, communities and their members must be understood in the context of the community’s structures. Only then can we begin to understand not only who they are and what they do, but how their actions and their brand relationships will be received by the community at large.

Community Structures: Types, Roles, and Behaviors

Every community is different, of course. They develop unique systems and social contracts amongst the members that define the boundaries of the community. There are, however, a some definitions that we can use as a baseline to approach understanding communities online.

While I have my own loose , they aren’t nearly as thorough as what Lara Lee and Susan Fournier developed with over 30 years of research on community formation.

3 Types of Community Affiliation

Fournier and Lee describe 3 types of community affiliation:

Pools are groups who “have strong with a shared activity or goal, or shared values, but loose associations to one another” whose affiliation is created through “shared activity, goal, or values.”

KEY EXAMPLES: Apple fans, Political Parties, Ravelry

Webs are groups who “have strong one-to-one relationships with others who have similar or complementary needs,” where affiliation is primarily defined through “personal relationships”

KEY EXAMPLES: Facebook, Twitter, cancer-survivor networks

Hubs are groups who “have strong connections to a central figure and weaker associations with one another,” and define their affiliation through “a charismatic figure.”

KEY EXAMPLES: Oprah, Joss Whedon, Obama

These categories, of course, are not absolute and there’s plenty of cross-over. For instance, we might characterize a typical high school social system as a web that has within it a number of different hubs and pools. Similarly, Obama-supporters can easily also be seen as a pool, and Apple fans might cluster around Steve Jobs as a hub.

Community Roles

Fournier and Lee also outline 18 typical roles that individuals take on in communities:

1. Mentor: “teaches others and shares expertise”

2. Learner: “enjoys learning and seeks self-improvement”

3. Back-up: “acts as a safety net for others when they try new things”

4. Partner: “encourages, shares, and motivates”

5. Storyteller: “spreads the community’s story throughout the group”

6. Historian: “preserves community memory, codifies rituals and rites”

7. Hero: “acts as a role model within the community”

8. Celebrity: “serves as a figurehead or icon of what the community represents”

9. Decision-Maker: “makes choices affecting the community’s structure and function”

10. Provider: “hosts and takes care of other members”

11. Greeter: “welcomes new members into the community”

12. Guide: “helps new members navigate the culture”

13. Catalyst: “introduces members to new people and ideas”

14. Performer: “takes the spotlight”

15. Supporter: “participates passively as an audience for others”

16. Ambassador: “promotes the community to outsiders”

17. Accountant: “keeps track of people’s participation”

18. Talent Scout: “recruits new members”

I would also include two additional roles that are prevalent amongst content-creation communities:

Curator: organizes and curates community content for easy navigation

Enabler: scaffolds the creation process to encourage community content production

Community Behaviors & Activities

Finally, all communities have their own set of specific activities, but the rise of participatory culture and the networked information economy has lead to the increasing scale and visibility of a general set of behaviors.

Building from Clay Shirky’s work, Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine describes four key modes of online participation: Sharing, Cooperation, Collaboration, and Collectivism

Sharing: One of the most fundamental logics of social participation online. We use YouTube to share videos, Twitter to share status updates, Flickr to share images, Delicious to share links, blogs to share ideas and information.

Cooperation: Sites like Flickr aren’t just used to share photos, but tag, group, organize, and reuse under creative commons. Through cooperation, it becomes more than just a sharing platform — it’s a vast archival resource. Similarly, aggregation sites like Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot use cooperation to “steer public conversation.”

Collaboration: Collaboration describes more organized and focused cooperative efforts, where groups and individuals pool resources toward common goals. Open-source software is a key example, where many contribute labor and expertise towards shared software development.

Collectivism: More clearly structures and potentially ideologically driven examples of sharing, cooperation, and collaboration activities.

Thus ends the basic primer on online communities, compiled from observations from my work at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium and the work of many individuals way more awesome than myself.

The bottom line though really is that communities — online and off — are social and cultural formations. Understanding the surface trends and tools is the first step, but if we must also seek an understanding of the deeper driving structures if we hope to develop long-term strategic provisions in addition to short-term tactical responses.

One of my biggest complaints about the blog-o-sphere is that the trade-off of being able to write more casually and toss out ideas that are just beginning to brew is that there sometimes isn’t enough attention paid to citation/reference/attribution. This isn’t so much a problem of credit where credit is due (though that can also be a problem at times). The problem is that it makes it robs us of a valuable research tool: namely, getting a big list of what people you’re reading are themselves reading.

I don’t make a ton of direct references, so adding a list of citations to my posts Grant McCracken style won’t be of much help. Instead I thought I’d start doing a weekly round-up of some highlights from what I’m reading, since I tend to read pretty widely across a number of different fields, all of which influences my thinking directly or indirectly one way or another.

• Wharton Business School announced new research that challenges Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory (Download full pdf at the bottom of the article). Their data-bolstered work looks at the limitations in how the long tail defines “hit” and “niche” products only in absolute terms (ie, top 10) rather than relative metrics (top 10%). An interesting read overall, and I’m always all about talking about ambiguities in definitions.

• Henry Jenkins has a piece in the Huffington Post this week about The Future of TV where he talks about post-network television, transmedia, and the role of social media in the consumption of TV content. Anyone familiar with Henry’s work will have heard him talk about many of the examples he mentions elsewhere, but the article is a good, quick rundown of some of the key points and cases that recur in his presentations. (I have to admit, seeing “my students at University of Southern California” instead of “my students at MIT” was momentarily jarring.)

• In a similar TV/Fans/Participatory Media vein is Jason Mittell’s study of Lostpedia in the current issues of Transformative Works and Cultures. I’m had mixed feelings in the past about that journal for fandom-related reasons, but there’s been interesting work being published (and more importantly, made openly accessible).

• Following a couple of interesting new transmedia cases: Flash Forward and Dragons v Robots.

• On the transmedia front, I’ve been reading a lot things scattered here and there. Gunther Sonnenfeld has a piece on transmedia as marketing strategy. I have to admit that I would’ve like more depth and specific discussion given the length of the piece, but overall it makes for a decent primer for those new to the concept. Even better though is that it led me to former MIT CMS/C3 alum Ivan Askwith’s not-so-recent-but-highly-relevant resource list post on transmedia and advertising cases and research. Tons of great links and case descriptions that runs down all the greatest hits as well as a few lesser known examples and perspectives. And finally, there’s some great discussion going on between Scott Walker and Erek Tinker in the comments of my last post.

A couple of things that I’d read before but recently revisited that are worth a mention:

• Susan Fournier and Lara Lee’s great article in the Harvard Business Review on Getting Brand Communities Right lays out some key principles about community behaviors, motivations, and organizational structures in a really clear, smart, market-relevant way. Absolutely required reading for anyone thinking about brands and community courting, online and off.

• Television Melodrama (links directly to pdf, requires MIT certificate to access), the article by Prof. David Thorburn that inspired my post on Transmedia and multiplicity is definitely worth reading. Don’t let the “melodrama” deter you — this article has proven really fruitful in shaping my thinking on many things that don’t fall under the heading of television melodrama. For those without MIT access, it can also be found in the collection Television: The Critical View

Offline, I’m hitting up a few books I’ve been meaning to get around to:

• On the academic front, I’m finally cracking Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism by Miryam Sas, in hopes that some older examples of transnational/transcultural movement of expressive forms and genres will shape some of my further research in the online circulation of content.

• Also started reading Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, the first in the Takeshi Kovacs novels, and really my first foray into Sci-Fi/Genre fiction.