Assignment #6: Option 1

The Leviathan is described in Wallace (by a quote from Thomas Hobbes) as a "mortal god." Wallace herself describes it as a "system of government that we empower to resolve disputes." In terms of the Internet, the Leviathan is, in my terms, "that which keeps order."

The Leviathan on the Internet can take many forms, but one with which I have personal experience - and which Wallace also mentions - is that of the moderator of a message board. For a period of several years I served as a moderator (one of 30 or so) on a message board focused on several card games, which has (currently) over 61,000 members.

On a forum that large, the moderators' jobs are daunting. When a user posts something in violation of the (extremely lengthy) forum rules, the mods enforce order by directing that user to the rules and locking the thread. This was the "arched brow" - the gentle reminder that the user had done something unacceptable.

One commonly broken taboo was (and is) posting a question about how to obtain a signature, the answer to which was in the rules thread. The preponderance of such posts reached such a point where the Leviathan expanded. It wasn't just moderators directing these users to the appropriate topic; regular users began doing this as well. A user asking about his signature will, nowadays, receive four or five (usually vitriolic) responses before a moderator steps in and closes (or deletes) the thread. These arched brows are, as Wallace put it, "not so gentle." On this particular forum these actions - sometimes called "mini-modding" - were frowned upon by us real moderators, because would-be moderators were instead asked to utilize the "Report Problem Post" feature, which allowed users to point out troublesome threads to the mods, who would then deal with them.

Although users could, in theory, learn about this taboo by reading the forum rules, these rules were relatively well hidden and I would wager that comparatively few users actually read them. Most users learned not to start such threads by trial and error - they'd post, they'd get corrected (and sometimes flamed), and then they wouldn't do it again. The Leviathan did its job very efficiently.



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