Assignment 6, Option 1: A multi-headed monster?

Online forums are perfect examples of leviathan controlled sub-communities. Most of these asynchronous message boards have a system of observers and “official” reproachers—a board of administrators, if you will. There are relatively strict social norms in the online community I enjoy lurking in. Off-topic comments and or posts are generally looked down upon, and the site seems to stir artistic or creative discussion, rather than to provide a haven for people to come together and socialize in an online space. In this forum, “mods” and “admin” are given the control to calm potential flame wars, boot trolls from the community, and to serve as figureheads for social web-order. New members who may be infringing on the rules are given friendly warnings, and are usually amiable and smart enough to figure out what the boundaries are after a short period of time. Though this is the basis of many forums, I’d actually like to discuss a different branch of the leviathan concept.

What kind of leadership is necessary to drive a leviathan, and is it just as effective to have multiple moderators and administrators doing their own work as compared to a single consistently informed team? One of my best friends is a mod in this forum and over the past year she has observed various things that seem to contradict some points made in Wallace’s chapter four segment. Though the general idea for the existence of a leviathan rests with the members of a society (i.e. we want a leviathan to exist so that we feel comfortable in our internet environment), the chapter does not really touch on the internal organization of a leviathan in order to efficiently moderate an online space. After I had clarified to my friend that a leviathan was a “mortal God” of sorts (as stated by Hobbes), she added that rather than being a “mortal God”, her admin team was more of like a “multi-headed monster.” Wallace says on page 70, “In many cases, the moderators play a very relaxed role and rarely kill anyone’s contribution.” I feel that roles of administrators have become much more complex than Wallace makes them out to be. My friend declares that a lack of leadership and a lack of a single overruling force results in unnecessary complexity of seemingly simple tasks. For example, a member may be trolling the boards and bothering all the members around him, but he may not have broken any of the forum’s actual rules. Without a single deciding force that is able to ban this member, the board of admin and mods must deliberate, discuss, and make difficult a very simple solution.

Though it’s not a problem that may be addressed anytime in the near future, it seems that it is a factor of the leviathan concept that should be considered.