6.1: The Leviathian on phantasytour.com

For years I've been a member of a website that obsesses about the band Phish. The site is phantasytour.com and anyone who is a regular in the community is very (just as I am) way too interested in thinking about a band that doesn't even play together anymore. Opinions are strong on this site, which is fascinating, considering how trivial the substance of the posts are when you really analyze what is being discussed. I chose to look at a couple of instances of breaching norms within the environment of the phantasytour.com discussion boards because emotions run high and polarization is evident in every thread of discussion. Wallace's concept of the Leviathan is created by the reaction of the group to a particular post. I'm very careful when I post information because I know that the response will be immediate, and strong.

Wallace describes the Leviathan as being a system which, while possibly limiting our freedoms, serves to maintain a standard or norm in an environment. On the Internet, particularly in discussion forums and newsgroups, this is often done by means of a moderator who can control what actually gets published; the moderator is a gatekeeper. On phantasytour.com there is no such gatekeeper. The only rules (or as Wallace might put it, "sign on the door") is the Terms of Use for the site, which is largely very vague and often overlooked. For this forum, the moderators are the regular, dedicated users who are watching like a hawk, waiting for bad information or spam. My first example of this is how quickly the community sprung to life when a user falsely announced the reuniting of the band.

This fake announcement was an obvious lie to those of us who know the situation and have been in the scene for a while. But there were plenty of viewers who took the news as real. The reaction was immediate and the reproach was a constant barrage of insults and complaints. In the end, it was apparent that it was meant as a joke, but the response was not one of humor, and eventually the user who posted the false information issued an apology and that ended the thread. Here the response was extremely vocal, which isn't always the case. Sometimes silence acts as the "raised eyebrow."

Such was the case in another instance on the same board, when a user posted a plug for a brand of guitar strings which he was endorsing. This sort of posting happens regularly, and it is unappreciated by everyone, even though the demographic is perfect for the ad. We don't want to have to filter out spam. It was clear that nobody had any interest in responding, not even to complain, to make the point that such posts were unwelcome.

So Wallace's concept of self-governing by means of creating the Leviathan is evident, even when a formal structure isn't put into place. A medium need not have a moderator to act as judge and jury -- a passionate group of dedicated users can have the same effect.