This topic is particularly attractive to me as it is something I spend a bit of time thinking about also. How does one measure the health of a community? If Ben Okri is right, one can tell by the ‘health’ or ’sickness’ of its stories and cultural practices, whether a community (virtual or actual) is well or sick.

Of course when we speak of a community, we are essentially speaking of a social individual, something you recognize when you say, “what works for one community, won’t work for another”. Thus MySpace as a social individual is distinct from Facebook or Bebo. MySpacing feels different from Facebooking… but empirically, there are also radical differences in the affordances of each social individual - MySpace for instance is often perceived to offer space for greater creative expressions compared to Facebook. Thus there are things one does in one community that one may not in another. In the same way, there are things one does in one country that one may not in another (one might smoke a joint in Amsterdam and not in New York City for instance).

Measuring the health of any individual (whether at the level of a person or community) is not like measuring say temperature. It is more like measuring a prevailing mood or taking a snapshot of a dynamic stable state (a state of social ritual equilibrium if you like).

Torkild Thanem and Stephen Linstead (2006) note in their discussion of multiplicities,

“An object cannot be hot at the same time as it is cold – its capacity to withstand a multiplicity of temperatures can therefore only be demonstrated sequentially. This holds for the human sensation of temperature too – although parts of our body might be hot whilst others are cold, a singular part is not both hot and cold at the same time. Heat and cold are intensive properties – they don’t add to each other but average out across the system. But is human happiness equally capable of being viewed as an absence of sadness? We all have experiences which are tinged with, or even lie between both, moments when we do not know whether to laugh or cry. They are present together within us, not as external objects acting upon us with separate influences, and happy/sad cannot be collapsed like heat/cold into the simultaneity of the single metric of temperature, a terrain through which we move like mercury moving up and down the thermometer scale. They are therefore extensive – they can be and are split as different qualities. The virtual shifting and becoming of mood is relational and qualitative, irreducibly experienced and intuited rather than measured and calculated”.

The question of measuring a community’s health, or happiness or sadness is not a question of measuring degrees… we are dealing with an altogether different multiplicity that must be intuited.

What you do get at in your post with the image of equalizers is the knowledge that the intuition of a social individual involves a multiplicity of variables… we can call this the beginning of an engineering diagram of social individuals.

Just a whole bunch of lines of thought… I’m slowly working together into a blog post on qualitative and quantitative measurements and the mistakes made too often in psychological and social sciences in regards to other multiplicities at work.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I frequent your feeds and enjoy the material you make available. The metaphor you used in this post gets us closer to “packaging the gut.”

When old guard meets new guard we have an interesting chasm to cross. There’s so much “tuning” to do.

Thanks again, and best wishes in the New Year!

Chris Ronan

http://livingcode.blogspot.com/2005/12/sierra-sliders.html

Looking forward to see what comes next!

David Wilcox writes about the role of Social Reporter. “Online forums need hosts and moderators, workshops need facilitators, networks require some weaving to develop links. But how, for example, do you do that fast around an event, capture content, a…