Had a frustrating interaction with a couple of folks in the scooter crowd. A friend suggested that I share my pictures of High Rollers, so I posted a link to them on the San Francisco scooter group on Yahoo.
First comment was from a guy asking me to put my pictures on scoot.net. Well, it was actually more of a statement/demand than it was a request, but there was nothing judgmental about it, and it was polite, if a bit curt.
After a few more escalating posts, this one guy–let’s call him Matt–said "come on people… if you want to share your pictures, post them on scoot.net. Its tradition in the scooter community."
To me, the "come on people" was a clear statement of exasperation at my not fitting into Matt’s view of the scooter community.
Not that I’ve really tried to fit in. I’ve felt unwelcome since the first Sunday ride Heather and Patrick brought me to almost a year ago: before the ride started, six or seven guys spent half-an-hour disparaging the newer, automatic scooters (like mine), and suggesting that owners of these scooters needed to grow up and buy a clearly superior (in their eyes) vintage scooter. Not a good first impression–I mean, gimme break: we’re not talking Harley v. Honda, Porsche v. Toyota. These are dork scooters. Anyway, I wasn’t impressed, and have been wary ever since.
Anyway, the second thing that bothered me about the post was the statement: "if you want to share your pictures, post them on scoot.net." Now, take a look at the requirement, and extrapolate the implied reverse logic: "if you don’t post your pics on scoot.net, don’t share them" or "the requirement for sharing is to post pics on scoot.net." The message: If you won’t do it our way, then don’t do it at all. [OK, there’s a hint of reductio ad absurdum in my argument here, and I know it. But the implied logic is there, even if I’m stretching my rhetorical muscles a bit].
The last straw, though, was the tradition-based claim on my photography: Any sub-culture or community, especially one that is growing beyond its original membership, experiences the pains of transmitting traditions, practices and norms of behavior if the community grows much larger than the initial, core base. Hell, it’s not just sub-cultures and communities: it’s a basic tenet of corporate organizational behavior that can easily be applied to non-corporate entities. I mean, what is a corporation other than a fictive legal person with financial assets wrapped around a community or sub-culture of people? The people are what matter. The rest is just a balance sheet that can be taken to court. When a small, entrepreneurial group with close ties, a clear culture, and shared values/goals becomes successful in the marketplace, that group will need (or may want) to expand its operations/membership. But how do you indoctrinate a large group of new people into the values of that core community? You can’t, at least not easily. Slow growth is the only real way. Most of the time, the incumbent community has to adapt to those new members as much as the new members have to adapt to the existing community, and some members of that initial community will become disillusioned with the perceived loss of closeness and shared purpose that transition requires.
EA is a perfect example: the company is facing a major challenge in dealing with the large group of new developers, designers and producers who consider EA to be an employer, not a lifestyle and financial investment.
A community can also make demands on its members based on the traditions of the community. The stronger the bonds within the community, the more force those traditions have. Just think of the hazing rituals in some fraternities: forcing people to drink to potentially fatal levels, physical and psychological abuse, sleep deprivation; none of these are acceptable norms of behavior to society at large. These communities not only encourage and applaud this, but in many cases make it mandatory behavior. Or consider the power of an Arab tribal council to determine who can marry whom, or whether to turn in (or harbor) a terrorist or insurgent. The traditions of the tribe require that the will of the tribal leaders supersede that of the state or the free will of the individual.
OK, now neither of those is a fair comparison to the scootering community nor to Matt’s tradition-based request regarding posting my intellectual property on a site not of my choosing. I think it’s more along the lines of Prof. Silber requiring students to pay $20 if their cellphone rings in Foundations of Finance, or a corporation imposing blogging guidelines on its employees.
No, the most apposite example to the scooter crowd–and perhaps most painful to some–is the San Francisco Scooter Girls. Initially founded by a handful of friends who didn’t even have M1 endorsements on their licenses, the group grew so rapidly that the initial method of casual organization was becoming cumbersome, and some members of the group decided to formalize structures–to go from an entreprenuerial structure to a functional structure. Man, this is just textbook organizational behavior! And some founding members felt that some of these changes violated the underlying purpose of the organization, became disillusioned, and left the group. The catalyst for some founders leaving–an argument over the distribution of embroidered patches that couldn’t cost more than $15 a piece–might seem silly on the surface. But those patches are the group’s symbol of the group, they represent membership and belonging. Changing how those patches are distributed represent a fundamental change in the definition of Belonging, and thus a significant shift in what the group IS.
I never intended to step into the cultural conflicts in the SF scootering community. I saw it the first time I went on a ride, and as a result, I kept to the periphery of the community so I would not get swept up in it. Didn’t quite work out. I knew I shouldn’t have shared.
As one of the newer members of the expanding scootering community, and as someone who is proud to be, as Matt aptly put it, "a retard riding a scooter", I simply do not feel bound by the traditions of that original core, nor do I share all of the core values of that intensely loyal founding group. The message I received from Matt was that a) he represents the scootering community, and b) I should conform to his vision of the community, or leave. The prevailing silence backed him up.
I choose to leave.