The Socially Competent Node

Consider the following deviant characters: loose cannons, blabbermouths, gossipers, and yentas, stool pigeons and canaries, tattlers and squealers, garblers, the nosy, the deaf to hints, talkers-out-of-school, missers-of-winks, leakers, spoilers of surprises, whistle blowers, betrayers, moles and turncoats, unreliable messengers, and friends who “didn’t realize you’d want to know” or forget to mention. In each case the deviance lies in the social handling of information. 

Curiously, they can all be distinguished from the most well know information deviant, the liar, by the fact that they can be deviant while handling "the truth."  These characters are "deviant nodes" who fail at their duties in a social information networks.  They do so by passing along what they should not, or by transmitting to the wrong people, or by notifying in the wrong manner, time, or sequence.  They fail to discriminate.  They introduce errors into the message.  They do not distinguish relevant from irrelevant.  They miss the real message, fail to appreciate urgency or delicateness. They let down those who trusted them to stay silent or to speak up.

The list above shows that we have lots of nouns to describe those who talk out of turn, but few for for those who fail as nodes by saying too little.  Adjectives abound: "diffident"implies not speaking up when one could or should, and "reticent" means "to remain silent" and implies a hesitance to pass along information.  And there are familiar utterances such as "What? Why didn't you tell me?" or "I didn't think you would want to know…" that are evocative of the node who falls down on the job, but the social types seem not sufficiently crystalized to have names the way the overzealous communicators do. We do have terms of approbation to describe those who positively exceed expectations of discretion and reticence: confidantes, bosom buddies, pals, and cronies are all characters with whom information is safe, but even these are not as general as the negative types, each being tied to specific others.

While the colorful terms above describe empirically unusual roles, the potential for each of the behaviors is high.  The social networks of everyday interaction are full of opportunities for nodes to get it wrong or go rogue. Each of us walks around "recording" images and sounds and actions and utterances, we engage in conversations and we have random thoughts, all material that we could "post" to our ("real world") social networks, pass along to the next person we run into.  But mostly we do not.  

What stops us from describing to colleagues the sounds a co-worker just made in the bathroom or what one's spouse said last night? Why do we not worry that our kids will narrate for their friends the details of her parents' recent fight or that our colleague will reveal the source of that tidbit about the boss we passed along? Even people who completely take to heart advice to "never put something in an email that you don't want the world to see," are far less guarded and vigilant in everyday life.  

The relative worry that we put into Facebook privacy settings compared to the nonchalance with which we participate in everyday social networks suggests the phenomenally high levels of "privacy settings" we take for granted in the people around us.  Most of the nodes in our everyday social networks, we seem to assume, know how to be socially competent nodes.  

Before they are very old, before they've been friends for very long, before they have much experience on the job, they are masters of nuance and signaling, they understand the security clearance levels in within circles of friends and family, they understand what is for attribution and what is not, what is on the record, what is off; without being explicitly told they know what does not leave a room, what was not said by you, and what was never said at all;

But how do they get that way?  How does one learn to be a (competent) node? That's what this chapter is about.

Religion and Learning to be a Node

A short excerpt from zeroth draft of chapter "Learning to be a node"

The chapter is about how social networks depend on competent nodes and how competent nodes are made rather than born.  I show how primary and secondary socialization help us learn what we can tell to whom when.  Other sections in the chapter are about children as spies; discretion as a social achievement; humor, drama and the incompletely socialized node; the social organization of omniscience; and the social control of nodes in corporations and states.

For Jews and Christians, the most well known religious exhortation about information behavior is probably the commandment "thy shall not bear false witness" (Exodus 20:16, Deuteronomy 5:20), but sacred texts are rich in behavioral guidance for nodes in social networks.  The admonitions are general guides for information behavior and suggest misgivings about humans as untutored nodes in community communication networks.

The most basic suggestion is to err on the side of silence.  Imam Nawawi, the 13^th century Islamic commentator,[1] says 

"It is obligatory for every sane adult to guard his tongue against talking, except when it contains a clear benefit. If talking and remaining silent are of equal benefit, it is sunnah (normative) to abstain, for permissible talking might lead to something undesirable or forbidden, as in fact is very often the case, and nothing matches safety."

The book of Proverbs (21:23) suggests "Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble" and in Ecclesiastes (3:7) we are reminded that there is "a time to keep silence, and a time to speak."  In the Christian New Testament, Saint Paul exhorts the Ephesians  to "[l]et no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear" (4:29). The Koran is on the same page: "He does not utter a [single] word, except that there is, with him, [an angel] ready and waiting [to record it]" (50:18).

The baseline recommendation, then, for nodes is mindfulness about what they transmit; in a word, nodes should not always be "on." But all of these traditions go into greater specificity about what responsible and socially competent nodes should and should not "put on the network."

Both Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions address gossip and "tale-telling" as a continuum of network behaviors that require regulation. Three levels are specified in the Torah: mere idle talk; negative truths about others; and negative falsehoods about others. The first, Avak lashon harah, follows from the suggestion to err on the side of silence, prohibiting rechilut or “peddling,” prattling on, repeating things for the sake of repeating them (Leviticus 19:16).  A more serious network sin is for a node to be a conduit for negative information, even if it is true, unless it is specifically intended to improve a bad situation.  Lashon hara means repeating negative truths.  The most serious infraction is Hotzaat shem ra, slander or defamation through spreading untrue negative things about others.

This suggests an awareness that a community depends on actors to socially attenuate what gets through to the network, to apply generic content rules to what they do and do not transmit.  And nodes are not only prohibited from sending gossip along, they are actually also enjoined from Mekabel lashon harah, accepting and believing gossip or slander (Pesachim 118a).  This is, perhaps, a recognition that the temptation to pass gossip along is so strong that the only way to avoid it is to prevent the information's arrival in the first place.

In Sharia law, slander, gossip, and backbiting, or "ghiba" is regarded as a major sin, perhaps more serious than adultery (Al-Ghazali 2008):

"O you who believe! Avoid much suspicion, for some suspicions are a sin. Do not spy on one another, nor backbite one another. Would one of you love to eat the flesh of his dead brother? Nay, you would abhor it, [so similarly, avoid backbiting]. And fear Allah. Indeed, Allah is Most Forgiving, Most Merciful." (Qur'an, [49:12])

The excessive attention given in these traditions to the regulation of gossip suggests a keen awareness of the deleterious effects of unregulated communication networks. In the book of Proverbs the transmission of gossip is connected to social conflict: "Without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down" (26:20) and the destruction of relationships: "He who covers over an offense promotes love, but whoever repeats the matter separates close friends" (Proverbs 17:9). These traditions are also aware of the non-linear effects of deviant information transmission; in the epistle of James we read "The tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell" (James 3:5-6).

Too, nodes are admonished to eschew second hand information:  "And do not follow that of which you do not have knowledge. Indeed, the hearing, the sight and the heart - [you] will be asked about all of those" (Qur'an, [17:36]).

In these sources we even find attention being paid to the micro-sociological aspects of nodal behavior. Rashi, the medieval Torah commentator, notes that winking is a behavior common among those who would traffic in gossip. "To eat the food of winking" was understood as a way of sealing the deal – you spread gossip and your willingness to break break proves your sincerity but the winking part means that some folks are in on it and know it is gossip while those unsuspecting hearers take it as reportable truth. [2]

The counsel to prefer silence is not an absolute that would shut networks down.  Believers are reminded that even as they are enjoined from spreading malicious gossip, nodes still have obligations upon receiving certain kinds of information:

If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in that wicked men have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, "Let us go and worship other gods" (gods you have not known), then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. Deuteronomy 13:12-15

Another aspect of being a competent node is to wisely pick the nodes to which you are connected.  The Book of Proverbs suggests that gossip reveals meta-information about the gossiping node:

With his mouth the godless destroys his neighbor, but through knowledge the righteous escape... A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy man keeps a secret (Proverbs 11: 9;13).

and

A gossip betrays a confidence; so avoid a man who talks too much (Proverbs 20:19).

This same observation also shows up in a Spanish proverb, "Quienquiera chismea a ti chismeará sobre ti"(best-quotes-poems.com. 2007): Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. (worldofquotes.com 2013). Publilius Syrus, a first century BC wit also counseled picking friends on the basis of their nodal competence: "Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world" (worldofquotes.com 2013)(Wikipedia Editors 2013). Horace (65BCE-8BCE) gives similar advice: "Percunctatorem fugito, nam garrulus idem est; / Nec retinent patulæ commissa fideliter aures" : Avoid an inquisitive person, for he is sure to be a gossip; ears always open to hear will not keep faithfully what is intrusted to them (Wood 1899).

References

1. Al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Muhammad. 2008. “TheRules of Backbiting.” Qibla - for The Islamic Sciences.
2. Best-quotes-poems.com. 2007. “Cotizaciones y Refranes Del Chisme.”
3. Wikipedia Editors. 2013. “Publilius Syrus.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
4. Wood, James. 1899. Dictionary of Quotations From Ancient and Modern, English andForeign Sources. London, New York: Frederick Warne & Co. .
5. Worldofquotes.com. 2013. “Gossip Quotes.” WorldofQuotes.

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[1] Nawawi (1234–1277 CE) wrote about Fiqh, an expansion of conduct rules found in the Quran,

 and hadith which are reports of the sayings of the prophet.

[2] See Vayikra - Leviticus - Chapter 19.  Note emphasis there on spying on your neighbors so you could talk about them.  This relates directly to the material on children as spies.