Academic article about DetroitYES

[Lowell]

REPLY EMAIL
Hi Josh,

I have no issue with using my name, it’s no mystery anyway and I have always made my identity clear. Permission granted.

I am also happy to grant permission to use my pictures but I will note that any pictures in the forum added by other members are not for me to say. They may be theirs or not. They may be called in from another site. I don’t know. There is a legal gray area regarding fair use which covers their being posted on the site, but reproduction in other media is another issue. I can only speak for my content which is a sizable collection, certainly all in the Detroit tours. Please screen snap and send the images which you wish to use [or send the urls for the pages where they are] so I can confirm they are mine.

In return I would request that you respond to my observations below.
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It took a while to twice read through your “Racial Politics in Cyberspace: The Unexpected Potentials for Poaching Narratives and Building Bridges in an Online Community” and still more time for this reply.

Here are some notes that you may or may not find relevant.

1- Compared to what? There is an assertion that race is rarely discussed based on an analysis you made of threads for a set period of time. But there is no standard established for this alleged rarity.

The qualitative content analysis of threads on the forum focused on all of the threads from April of 2011 to August of 2011. Any threads that involved discussion about race, either as a primary topic or as a topic that emerged through commentary, were examined. There were nineteen relevant threads that emerged for examination, out of over one thousand threads posted during that time. Of those, seven threads actually focused on the issue of race [[either in the title or in the initial posting), while race only came up in the middle of the other twelve threads. Overall, the analysis revealed that there were two common themes concerning race within these threads: silence and idealism.

In reference to the first, the small number of threads that dealt with race reflect the fact that few people discuss the issue within the forums [[nineteen threads out of one thousand). In addition, many threads that did delve into race were quite short; only a single post or two. Usually, a person found a news story they felt might be of interest to other DetroitYES! members, and posted a link to that story. There may have been a comment or two, but there was no discussion about race, or even the primary subject matter of the linked news article.

How does this compares to some other established norm for the same period. If you sampled 1000 local newspaper articles, TV stories, and other media articles for the same time period, how would it compare? I’m willing to bet it is about the same. Issues of race in DetroitYES and the rest of the local media are not very common and only tend to surface when a cross gets burned on a lawn somewhere or the n-word scrawled in some public place.

Additionally issues that stray away from the topic of Detroit are moved to the more controversial Non-Detroit forum. Threads must be directly and continually Detroit-Windsor-metro-related in order to remain on the main Discuss Detroit forum. If the issue is about racism in a situation in Detroit or the suburbs it stays.

Race discussion has dropped in all media. I don’t know if it is the so-called post-racial era of the Obama phenomenon, years of established black leadership in Detroit where the black middle class flight has followed white flight or the topic just having been discussed to boredom point over the life of DetroitYES.

2-Who speaks for ‘Detroit’?

DetroitYES! is a discussion about the entire Detroit-Windsor metropolis, not just the City of Detroit, a foundation that is openly declared from the beginning on the site and, if you rewind the tapes, explained to you in my interviews. I believe you focus too narrowly only on the city of Detroit, and certainly it is at the core, while miss the broader mission.

IMHO your sampling model is flawed. You did a call out and took whoever came. A better model as I previously mentioned and offered would have been to draw a random sample from the registrants particularly members who have posted. Otherwise it is anecdotal like a radio call in show that draws the more vocal.

3-Stats?

The other thread, entitled “2005 DetroitYES! Stats,” was posted by the site administrator, Lowell Boileau, in January of 2006. In that thread, Boileau broke down the community by the following categories: gender, age, favorite ruin, favorite Detroit place, favorite eatery, where the members are from [[Detroit, Ann Arbor, etc.). Race or ethnicities as categories were noticeably missing from this statistical breakdown.

These stats are drawn from what members enter when registering.

A-race and ethnicity are noticeably missing because there is nothing. They are not asked for. Go to the forum and click register [make sure you aren’t logged in or you will not see that option] and you will see what questions are asked.

B-Many of these stats are optional and there is no knowing their veracity. Furthermore members can edit their profiles and many enter false data either upon registration or later to conceal their identities due to jobs and positions. Many prominent members of the local media participate incognito in this manner. I would guess that the margin of error is around 15% at best. It is little more than a straw poll.

4-Conditions for banning and post removal.

First, we discovered that the administrator of the site, Lowell Boileau, frequently avoided racial controversy from the forums through banning members and erasing their comments from threads. We first ran across this phenomenon in our interview with Crasher, a black activist who had been banned from the community on several occasions. According to Crasher, he often entered the community, and began conversations and dialogue about racism in Detroit and within DetroitYES! Essentially, Crasher claimed the city had been plagued by racism for decades, and that several white enterprises were organized to hide white supremacy in the city; DetroitYES!, he claimed, stood as one such enterprise. Crasher went on to explain to us that he was usually expelled and banned from the community by Boileau for his comments; he would then create a new account and identity in order to gain access again.

You only have my word for it, but that is both incorrect and exaggerated. It is akin to citing the opinion of a divorced spouse about the former spouse. Members are and never have been banned for racial topic discussion.

Members are only banned for name-calling, personal attacks and other infractions according to the rules as cited in our FAQ and agreed to upon registration: Rules of Participation on this forum - What everyone who joins this forum agrees to.

Every post on the forum has a ‘report post’ link. Consequently and fortunately we tend to get quick notice of violations. When violations occur we remove the offending post AND remove all subsequent posts that reference the initial name-calling post. The rest of the thread remains.

Action is taken against the offender either a warning or banning. Newbies will get the ax on first violation; established members get a warning and are only banned only on repeat offense.

Banning is permanent. Those who chose to resurface can expect to be banned again and will have all traces of any new participation removed. Gone is gone.

My statement below is misinterpreted. It says nothing from which you could or should conclude anyone has been banned or had posts removed for racial controversy. It clearly and only speaks to name-calling and by extension rules violations. The reference to race topics is that they was a greater propensity for those to devolve into rules violations. So do other topics. If a thread devolves into name-calling and rules violations only then that action is taken. The thread is not removed only the violative post and any that subsequently refer to it.

According to Boileau, conversations about race would often “spiral out of control” and lead to problems in the community. In order to overcome this problem, Boileau resorted to a policy of banning members for controversial comments about race, and subsequently erase their comments from the forums.

In the earlier days [discussions about race were] a little bit more heated at times… so things could get a little out of control and then once [people] do that they switch it to name-calling and it breaks down and it loses control and everything. Over time I’ve improved my moderation skills. I am very strict: no name-calling policy. I am very strict. I throw people out and I don’t give them a reason if they get into it now.

We would like to note, that at this point in the research, we found Boileau’s position to be problematic. From a critical theory perspective, shutting down and erasing such discourse about race and racism seemed to be authoritarian and instrumental in protecting white dominance.

Our situation is definitely problematic. Managing a forum with several thousand members who have posted over 1.5 million posts in its lifetime leaves little time for hand-holding and explanations for offenders.

If each member took a few minutes from our life, we would need another lifetime. We have to deal with spammers, pranksters, hackers, advertisers, hate groupers from the likes of ...........org and the entire panoply of trolls and attention-seekers. We have been called every name in the book including white racists and black racists.

We have to enforce civility quickly and economically or ultimately there will be no forum, let alone quality discussion. Otherwise it will devolve into other site you note, little of value will result and the lunatics will run the asylum.

But I still love doing it!


Best Wishes, Lowell

[Jimaz]

[Lowell]

^LOL I hear you!

Lots of TLDNR's for my posts for sure. But is it there for the curious.

[Jimaz]

^LOL I hear you!

Lots of TLDNR's for my posts for sure....

Actually, that comic came to mind while I was reading those abstracts.

It must be very gratifying to have created something like DetroitYES! that others actually write about. Kudos to you, Lowell.

[Toka313]

Just as a quick note, some of your critique is the use of qualitative analysis.

Subjectivity is normal in that type of work. Many Communication scholars embrace it rather than pretend like objectivity is possible. While you may not like qualitative analysis, it's not unusual at all. There are certain things that cannot be accomplished with numbers.

These are two camps that can snipe at each other [[ever heard the term "quantoids?") But both are valid forms of research. Discourse analysis demands a qualitative method, or rhetorical work [[which I 'try' to do) is arguably not even qualitative.

Yes, they critique the idea of not asking for race. There's a lot of work suggesting that color-blindness is problematic.

It sucks when people are critical of what you do. Don't take it personal. They're just trying to make an argument and support that argument. We should strive for constant critique so that we can constantly improve. Whether or not you agree with findings are up to you of course! The authors of course are not immune to that same type of critique!

And thanks so much for posting those emails. I'm hoping to publish soon myself, [[not about y'all, don't worry!) and seeing this interaction is enlightening.

[Jimaz]

... We should strive for constant critique so that we can constantly improve....

I can certainly agree with that from first hand experience. Organizations that promote that attitude are much more resilient than those that don't. When someone reports a mistake, the response is "Nice catch!"

[Lowell]

Just as a quick note, some of your critique is the use of qualitative analysis.

Subjectivity is normal in that type of work. Many Communication scholars embrace it rather than pretend like objectivity is possible. While you may not like qualitative analysis, it's not unusual at all. There are certain things that cannot be accomplished with numbers.

These are two camps that can snipe at each other [[ever heard the term "quantoids?") But both are valid forms of research. Discourse analysis demands a qualitative method, or rhetorical work [[which I 'try' to do) is arguably not even qualitative.

One of the reasons I exited the academic and social sciences grad school world was an insistent movement to the quantitative side that was in in vogue then. Computers and data analysis had arrived and qualitative was being scorned. So I agree with you that both are valid. I just think in this case a balance of the two would strengthen the study.

Ironically, over the years of this forum, a recurring complaint has been 'how come every thread turns to race'. I would give the same reply. 'Take a simple of count of the 100 most recent threads and tell me how many are about that topic. ' Crickets could be heard every time because the count would never be over 10% and usually under 5%.

The perception was otherwise mainly because the race debate threads were more heated but the reality of their actual amount was far less.