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I really liked this article from Gizmodo entitled: “When to Give Your Girlfriend Your Password” (Image above from Gizmodo).   The specific article talks about the proper time to give your Internet application passwords to your significant other.  In general, from a sociological point of view, it speaks to a growing societal understanding of what is the proper behavior associated with Internet applications.

In short, the article says that it is okay within a relatively short amount of time to give your Netflix password to your girlfriend or boyfriend…but it is never okay to give passwords for your Facebook, Email, or AIM accounts.  I agree.

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But Gizmodo does not go far enough in discussing this issue.  The article talks about girlfriends. and boyfriends..but what about spouses?

If you withhold your Facebook or email password from your spouse, will it be interpreted as you withholding something?  My guess is that how a couple views this issue will be closely aligned with the culture that they come from.  In collectivist cultures like Korea, Japan, and India, the sharing of passwords is probably a given.  In individualistic cultures like the United States and England, couples may decide to keep their passwords private. It goes even further.  I can bet that in male dominated cultures, women share their passwords more than men.  So in male dominated societies like Mexico, Thailand, or many African Countries, it is more likely that the woman will share her passwords (or be forced to share them) than the man

Just some food for thought.

There are at least two possible answers to this question*:

1. People help those they hardly know because there are incentives embedded in the online community (e.g. reputation, points, etc.). This approach sees people as individual, rational, resource maximizers.
2. People help because it is in our evolved nature to do so. We are natural cooperators, and for many forms of group activity we do not need any incentive. This approach sees people as fundamentally social animals, with an innate desire to work collectively.

Most scholars of human behavior have spent the last twentieth century working under the first assumption that we need incentive in order to do things that have no direct benefit to us (e.g. in order to get students to fill out a survey, we need to offer them money, otherwise they would not do it). Further, in cases where incentives could not be offered, then punishments needed to be given in order to encourage collective behavior (e.g. if there was no fine for littering, more people would simply drop their trash because it is not in their best interest to walk to a trash can). This assumption is strongest in economics, but it permeates even my discipline, sociology. We also see this approach in businesses, law,
and public policy. Everyone was trying to find out how to get the incentives right.

But in the past thirty years or so, research in economics, social psychology, and evolutionary biology has led to the conclusion that we are natural cooperators. In short, in any population, there are usually more cooperators (people who need no incentive) than non-cooperators. So, given a population of users in an online community, you will always get a good number of people who are willing to simply answer questions without needing any incentive – no points, no votes, nothing**.

There is a catch however. Many natural cooperators lend a helping hand, and expect help in return. If they do not get help, they will not be so generous in the future (for those who read economics or social psychology or evolutionary psychology books, this is the “tit-for-tat” strategy).

In most online forums you have very little participation because those who are willing to write posts and comments soon find that most people simply read the posts, get the information, and do not participate. Those natural cooperators then leave.

So, in an online community, there needs to be a critical mass of cooperators to keep exchanges going.

Ironically, this leads us back to the first answer, that people are selfish and need incentives to cooperate. In order to have a stable, and vibrant online community you need to make sure to provide incentives for selfish people who only respond to “votes” or “likes” or some other form of reward. If there was some way to know the composition of the people browsing a website, one could calibrate the code to fit that composition. However, we never know, so it is always a safe decision to go ahead and give rewards. That way the cooperators will be reciprocated, and the selfish ones will get their reward.

So, like most things in life, the answer is not a simple one. The answer is that people help those they hardly know because some are selfish and selfless!

*This question was posted on Quora, and I attempted to answer it there.  So, this is a repost….

**Yochai Benkler‘s The Penguin and the Leviathan gives a very good review of this literature.

I have begun to hang out a coffee shop near my home called Small Point Cafe.  Its a great coffeehouse.  Small Point is in a good location in downtown Providence with a lot of foot traffic.  I can sit at the window and people watch (one of my favorite pastimes).  The bathroom is clean, the service is nice, the ambiance is relaxing (in a granola-artsy type of way…see pics from another blogger here).  And, in what is now a requirement for coffee shops, they have free wi-fi.

Small Point Cafe finally broke my allegiance to Starbucks.  When my home or office surroundings get stale I go to Small Point for a fresh environment to stimulate my mind.  On this particular day I decided to do some more research on my white nationalism project.  I tried to log into the American Renaissance website, an avowedly white nationalist website.  Well…as it turns out, I cannot access many of those websites because…as the webfilter at Small Point says, they are websites of “hate and aggression”.

As a good liberal, I initially applauded this idea.  Let’s stop hate speech, I thought.  But then, I remembered recent arguments I had made about free speech and political correctness (here).  And then, I thought about even more recent arguments (my last post, actually) about how governments try and block websites they don’t like (here).

Is there much of a difference, in principal, between this sign and a "whites only" sign?

And suddenly I didn’t like the idea of Small Point blocking American Renaissance, or any website for that matter.  This raises so many questions.

• If I can draw a generalization from the ambiance of Small Point (organic, green, artsy) I can make an assumption that the owners and even more so the patrons of the cafe are left or center left in their political orientations.  Wouldn’t that imply some level of tolerance…even tolerance for groups that are intolerant?
• At the same time, this is a private enterprise.  Shouldn’t they have the right to ban whatever websites they see fit?
• But then, we don’t let private enterprises segregate their customers by race anymore (thank God…I couldn’t people watch if I had to sit in the back near the bathroom).  So should we let private enterprises segregate websites by political orientation – in effect putting websites showing that are deemed “hate websites” a “whites only” sign?

This amounts to the digital segregation of opinion.  Just food for thought.

Currently, I am working on understanding the online White Nationalist movement in the United States.  For those who are not in the know, this movement is a “pro-white” movement.  There are different strains of this movement, and this “reinstatement” may take different forms, but in general the ultimate goal is the removal of all non-white citizens (including Jews) from the United States.  Some of these sites include:

• American Renaissance
• Council of Conservative Citizens
• Occidental Dissent

As I spend time learning more about this movement, I am struck by the new knowledge (words, phrases, causal connections, theoretical explanations of real world phenomena) that I am experiencing.

A screenshot from the White Nationalist website American Renaissance. If you look closely, you can see articles about why interracial marriage is bad, and the corrupting influence of Mexican drug cartels.

It is only after I have spent some time lurking on these sites do I see the true power of the Internet with regards to free speech.  And, ironically, as a black man, I have come to believe that the websites that espouse White Nationalist ideas are at the vanguard of what Internet freedom means.

Let me explain…

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I remember reading some time ago an article by the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu where he mentioned the idea of symbolic violence – the cultural domination of one group by another, in which the dominant group imposes its cultural definitions onto the dominated group.  In plain speak, people who control the media tell us what is to be valued, what is to be believed, and basically how we understand the world around us.

iPhones are great products. But should they really get so much attention when most people are choosing other phones?

This theme is common in right wing circles, as they constantly talk about the liberal media.  I don’t find the conservative view of our media very compelling these days – there are enough outlets available from radio, to blogs, to cable to allow a conservative to see his views reflected in the media.

However, I do think that symbolic violence can occur for specific issues in which there isn’t a large pool of intellectuals, journalists, pundits and politicians putting in their two cents.  I think that this is what is happening with technology.  The technology blogosphere and the mass media are committing symbolic violence against non-Apple users.

Recently in a class I am teaching I asked my students: How many of you own apple products?  None raised their hand.  I fully expected over half if not all of my mostly white, middle class students to raise their hands. Now this could have just been a shy class, or one of those random flukes of life….but I don’t think so.   These students simply didn’t have a device owned by Apple.

This flies in the face of conventional wisdom.  Conventional wisdom would have it that everybody who is anybody has an iPod, iPhone, or iPad.  And this is especially true if you are young, middle class, and white.  If you believe this conventional wisdom, as I most certainly did before I took the time to think about, then you have become a victim of symbolic violence.

Blackberries are smartphones too!

Let me explain….

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