Online Community – Friends and Experts
This is a write up of the presentation I gave at yesterday’s Breakfast seminar at YouthNet.
The beginning
We often talk about how online community and social media can help promote services and increase their reach. What tends to get less attention is how online community itself can create a platform for delivering information and support services, not simply raise awareness about these services.
What do we mean here?
First, when thinking about how online community can deliver services, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical questions about the delivery mechanism. However, looking at online community through a tech perspective can only get you so far in how it can help deliver information and support services.
It can be more illuminating to explore this potential through a more sociological or psychological perspective, i.e. focusing on how people relate to each other in online communities, beyond the tech that enables these relationships.
Universal and holistic
In YouthNet’s case, the challenge it was founded to address back in the 1990′s was about opening up access to information and support for young people. The web has become a key way to making YouthNet’s approach both universal and holistic.
Holistic – across a broad range of issues
Online communities join up issues affecting the lives of young people, making it easier to put issues into a personal context. For example, tackling issues in the round means you can set an issue like housing support in a wider context of relationships and mental health, or an issue like drug use in the broader context of debt and sexual health.
This is an important difference that online communities have brought about in information and support services. For instance, while advice givers or information providers often focus on issues (that’s how most advice services are structured), the young person’s starting point is often much more confused and complex. Set in a personal context of the young person’s life, the issues that are affecting them are usually incredibly fluid and interlinked. It’s often hard for person experiencing the issues just to be able to explain and make sense of them. Online community with a more holistic approach can play a key role here.
It’s interesting that in terms of how the web’s structured following the success of the ‘Google’ model, access to information and support has depended on just how well you as a user can express what you need in terms of specific issues or keywords.
Universal – for all young people 16-25 years old
At the same time, online communities are proving that they’re a powerful way of joining up the people. With regards, support and information services particularly of note is the way online communities link together those affected by the issues and preserve what’s universal about people’s experience of these issues. Issues we may have faced or recognise we could face ourselves at a future point in time.
Online communities joining up people in this way, reinforce the message “you are not alone with the issues you face”. In fact, online communities where you share only what you’re comfortable sharing, can be a space where people can feel freer to explore the personal context and common humanity behind what can be incredibly emotive and sensitive issues. One particularly important contribution of online communities is how this universalist approach can bring both those directly affected by the issue at hand, together in open discussion with those not directly affected.
In terms of how the web’s structured and the rise of the ‘Facebook’ model, it’s clear that online information and support is increasingly mediated through our own personal online social networks. The starting point many young people now have in the search for information and support becomes the people they’re connected with, not necessarily the issues you identify with.
Ideal advisor: Friend and Expert
Many years ago, YouthNet commissioned some research. It asked young people about how they got the support and information they needed.
Out of the responses I remember reading, came the idea of the ideal advisor -a blend of two distinct personas.
● The advisor as friend – supportive, provider of emotional support, non-judgmental, a good listener
● The advisor as expert – someone that knows what they’re talking about, is a source of accurate info and an external perspective
What’s interesting is that with this idea of the ideal advisor lies a basic intuition: when it comes to offering information and support- no one person is enough.
In other words, it’s communities where we’re together, not as individuals acting separately, that are best equipped to respond to young people’s info and support needs.
No one person can easily fulfil both the role of ‘friend’ and the role of ‘advisor’. Each has its limitations:
● The friend’s intimate understanding often lacks external perspective.
● The expert’s specialist knowledge often lacks a personal touch.
There’s a growing body of academic literature on characterizing social relationships in this way that’s developing theoretical frameworks to better explain why these should be distinct social roles. For example, the work of Alan Fiske and Nick Haslam is a case in point which identifies four forms of sociality: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing. It’s interesting to note the strong parallels between idea of the ‘friend’ and that of Communal Sharing and Equality Matching on the one hand, and the idea of the ‘expert’ and Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.
Peer support and specialists
Online community adds something new to the mix between friends and experts. It can blend the values under which friends and experts operate. It can also challenge some of the age-old barriers that have existed between young people and support and info they need.
We know that online communities of friends can be strong – young people can express themselves online, they can feel heard, acknowledged, talking about the situation can help them make sense of their personal issues. Young people as friends online often re-evaluate their self-worth once they’ve supported one of their peers.
We know that online communities of experts can break down significant barriers that stand in the way of many young people’s access to the information and support services they need. Afforded anonymity, the time to express their issues in a way they’re comfortable with and on their own terms – young people reach out for expert intervention.
When you compare and contrast the values that ‘friends’ and ‘experts’ bring to online communities, it’s possible to detect the areas where these values merge.
For example, experts can learn about the benefits of encouraging discussion with the young people they want to engage. Through discussion and participation, experts can benefit from the hard-won insights of young people born of personal experience and knowledge.
Likewise, friends can gain a better understanding of the distinction between advice set out as balanced options grounded in empathy, and emotionally-charged discussion led by a well-meaning friend.
YouthNet’s changing role
If you’d asked us 10 years ago what the role of online community was, we would have probably have explained in terms of YouthNet’s role as a service provider.
In practical terms, that can mean many things: an editor, a moderator, a web developer, a volunteer manager, a partnership broker, and so on.
Today, the emphasis of these roles is very different.
As the idea of online community becomes more embedded in the everyday lives of young people, so it’s become a crucial means of opening up access to information and support for young people. It’s a special kind of service provision, which feels more like service facilitation rather than direct provision, i.e. with service providers on one side and service users on the other.
Facilitating community between friends and experts is in effect facilitating access to information and support.
How? In terms of roles:
● Editors instil an editorial tone that balances the friendly warmth of a friend- with the eye for detail of an expert
● Moderators help foster community understanding where there’s space for peer support alongside clear routes to the experts
● Teams of advisors combine trained peers on the one hand with highly qualified specialists on the other
● Volunteer managers develop support for volunteers -both from more experienced fellow volunteers and expert trainers or mentors
Online community is transformative
This subtle shift from provision to facilitation, shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s actually transformative when it comes to offering information and support.
For example, a transformation where those engaged in online communities understand and recognise that in the role of ‘friend’, they are themselves a source of support for their peers.
Or, a transformation where those in the role of ‘experts’ learn how to make their services more accessible to young people – in a way that overcomes young people’s practical and personal barriers that stand between them and the info and support they need.
In short, the tech behind today’s online communities may be new, but the challenge is the same.
Clearly, new technology brings with it plenty of new opportunities to take on this age-old challenge of opening up access to information and support for young people.
Whether we can seize this potentially transformative opportunity today, depends on whether or not we’re prepared to accept our new role: that of facilitating relationships and building community between the friends, experts, and the young people they seek to help.
