Final Lunch For Good, I Argue for a Technology Based Solution
It's been a nice series of lunches put together by J.R. Johnson, Chris Heuer, Myles Weissleder and the team at Lunch.com to discuss three topics.
To start off, we discussed "Responsible Participation" (Full Video, I come on at 16:25) and how to encourage conversation. What does it mean to have communities with real names and social contexts. What does it mean to encourage responsible participation? I argue during lunch that participation is not a technology problem so technology can't solve it, that it is much more of a social/societal issue.
In the second installment the topic became, "Promoting Critical Thinking" I again argue that this is not a technology problem but one that is sociological. Our culture does not value critical thinking and the inner life, our constant business and distractions take us away from having enough quiet time to reflect. (Video excerpt)
The third installment was on "Finding Common Ground" and I go towards a technology solution. I think the more we expose the user created content to give context during a conversation, the more human we see "the other". We talk about how there's universal themes of "loving your family" to the mundane, "liking soccer". If we have that information on the sidebar as we are talking about a hot button topic, wouldn't that bring more humanity into the conversation? Would it be harder to objectify the "other" and hate them? If we had technology that could crunch through all of the information and expose the similarities between two people, would that change the conversational tone?
What does this have to do with Community Management? These are all very important- how do we promote conversation? How do we set the tone for the conversation? Having common ground encourages civility and healthy communities. It seems that the Lunch For Good conversations were getting at "How to build healthy thriving communities".
All in all, a great series of lunches. I'm glad that I had the chance to meet everyone and discuss these topics, even if we didn't all agree. Look forward to the next series!
