Trouble at Kookaburra Hollow: how media mediate

Michael V. Arnold
Department of History and Philosophy of Science at The University of Melbourne
<[email protected]>

Christopher J Shepherd
Department of History and Philosophy of Science at The University of Melbourne
<[email protected]>

Martin R Gibbs
Dept. of Information Systems, The University of Melbourne
<[email protected]>

Abstract

Through 2005 a dispute played itself out at the Kookaburra Hollow housing estate. The dispute initially concerned allegations of poor build quality in some houses, the absence of broadband to the estate, and the absence of certain public amenities. However, it escalated to involve disagreement among residents about the strategies and tactics employed in the disputes. These strategies and tactics involved the use of four media – a Community Intranet, hand-made signs, public and private meetings, and a television broadcast. We describe the use made of these media as the dispute unfolded, and argue that each mediated the action in different ways. In our tentative analysis, the key factors that shape these sociotechnologies as actors are that they: act in different domains; act in different registers; and have different points of initiation and patterns of circulation. In comparing and contrasting the four media in these terms, we hope to understand more about this particular dispute, more about community networks, and more about media as actors.

Introduction

Community intranets, or web-based community networks, are becoming a more common part of the “total lifestyle” package offered to purchasers of master planned real estate developments in Australia. Mainstream real estate developers such as Delfin, Urban Pacific, Stonehenge, and the Docklands Authority are installing community intranets in their new green-field and high-rise developments. Similar trends can also be noted in master planned communities in the US and UK. Community intranets are being promoted as an efficient way of managing community services and amenities, and as a mechanism to mediate and enhance communication, and thus to foster a stronger sense of community within the community. Strong communities have always been attractive. In a context where the perceived existence of ‘a community’ is a marketing asset may add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the price of real estate, the importance of community is evident for purchaser and developer alike.

Community intranets are thus positioned by housing estate developers as desirable infrastructure, alongside the local park, the community centre, or golf course. Intranet governance and its on-going performance does however, bring its own set of problems. As students of community networks, web-based forums, electronic discussion-lists, and other on-line interactive spaces well know, the politics of those spaces can be fraught with difficulty (Castells 1996; Berg 1998; Schofield 2002; Arnold, Gibbs et al. 2003; Meredyth, Ewing et al. 2004). Whilst each interactive space manifests its own characteristics, many of these difficulties can be summed up through questions that go to issues of purpose and power. That is, how is the raison d’etre of the communicative space to be shaped, and how is that shape to be maintained and renovated as needed? And on what basis is the power to “speak” to be distributed, and once distributed, how is that power to be policed?

In this essay we describe how these questions were addressed at Kookaburra Hollo^w1, a residential community with a community intranet. We describe how the community intranet played a strategic role in the mediation of conflict between residents and their Developer, and how this same community intranet became the subject of conflict among residents, and between residents and the Developer. We also describe how other media were used to prosecute the dispute – in particular, through hand-made signs placed in windows, public and private meetings, and a television programme – and how they too became the subject of dispute.

Any dispute has many beginnings, but we can begin the story of this one with allegations made by some residents that the Developer had failed the residents in three main respects. The first was the claim that the build-quality of some houses was not up to scratch, and that as residents were required to select a ‘Developer Approved’ builder, the Developer shared a responsibility in ensuring that problems with build-quality were rectified. The second was the claim that the Developer had not built certain public amenities on the estate as promised. And the third was the claim that the Developer had promised that broadband communications would be available to residents of the estate but had not delivered. As the dispute unfolded, in significant part over the medium of the intranet, the media supporting the dispute became topics of contention. And so, as the use made of various media became subject to dispute, we saw how arguments over issues of media use compounded arguments over the substantive issues. The substantive questions that were at stake – questions of build-quality, of what might or might not be required of a Developer and of a Builder, and of who promised broadband to whom (and with what degree of clarity) – are not questions we intend to arbitrate in this essay. Rather, we address the mediation of the dispute through the various media, maintaining our analytic focus on negotiations and contestations about the purpose of media and of strategies of control and power.

Method, and Organisation of the Paper

Five key informants were interviewed for this paper. These included, Anthony and Kate Briggs and Jill and Jacob MacPherson, who were residents of the estate and participants in the dispute. Bill Flanders, the estate’s Body Corporate¹ Manager was also interviewed. Transcripts from the community intranet were examined and helped inform the argument presented here. The section that follows presents a chronological narrative of the dispute as it unfolded at Kookaburra Hollow. In the third section we analyse the strategic use of media through an approach that focuses on the domains, registers, and flows, which inhere in socio-technical communicative assemblages. Finally, we offer our conclusions.

Trouble at Kookaburra Hollow

Establishing Community

In February 2003 Anthony and Katie Briggs were preparing to move into their new house in the Kookaburra Hollow housing development, which would eventually have some 1000 homes. The development was marketed as an urban, family-friendly community estate with a rural flavor, yet with high-tech features. It would have a community ‘country club’, kids’ playgrounds and a football ground, bike and walking paths through forests of Australian river red gums, water conservation features, landscaping making extensive use of Australian native trees and plants, picnic shelters, a community intranet, and a modern technological infrastructure including broadband communications. While their house was still under construction, Anthony and Kate passed by the estate and got chatting with one of Kookaburra Hollow’s early occupants, who mentioned that the estate still had no broadband. Alarmed, Anthony recalls his reaction:

‘What? No cable?’ So I rang Pat Weaver who’s the project manager and said ‘I hear there’s no cable. So what you gonna do about it?’ He said, ‘How do you mean?’ I said, ‘you promised me cable. The first time I went into the sales office I was told there would be cable! I’m only a few months out of moving in and you’re telling me you can’t do anything about it?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re trying our best but we’re dealing with Telstra’². I said, ‘I know what you mean’. Everything is friendly at this stage. We moved in here in May. And then the long wait began. ³

For their first few months at Kookaburra Hollow building hiccups and deficiencies in the construction of their house took precedence over the Briggs’ technology concerns. Failing to have the builder acknowledge the problems, the Briggs had an independent architect’s report prepared, which listed some 40 problems in the construction. The report noted considerable gaps in the insulation, problems with ducting, and incomplete joins in the plaster. It was impossible to heat the house: ‘upstairs was a sauna, downstairs an icebox’, recalls Anthony. When the builder suggested that the Briggs attend to the repairs themselves, they brought the dispute into the public domain in a simple but effective manner. They displayed a large-format copy of the architect’s report in one of their front windows, ostensibly to remind the building contractors of the work that still needed doing, and advised the Builder that they would cross off the items as they were repaired. In an adjacent window, they exhibited an image of a big, unhappy face.

Others in the community, some of whom faced what they claimed to be even more serious construction problems with similarly recalcitrant builders, followed suit. Some appended insulting comments about their Builder to the list of alleged faults. With the estate in its early stages of release, and prospective buyers regularly driving up and down the streets of Kookaburra Hollow, some Builders were quick to meet the residents’ demands and to implore residents to take down their signs. Other Builders took a more assertive stance and threatened residents with litigation if they did not remove the ‘defamatory’ signs. Over the next few months the majority of building disputes were resolved and most of the window signs were removed.

Growing Solidarity among Residents

As the building disputes were slowly resolved, the attention of the Briggs and a number of other residents returned to the absence of broadband. For Anthony, who ran a small consulting business from home, this absence had serious economic implications:

Now we moved in from a place that had cable, I absolutely rely on it. If I get a phone call from a potential client, the first thing I do is go on the web and look at their site because I deal with big corporates and I can learn a lot of stuff really quickly about what they do, then I can make a phone call half an hour later and be reasonably confident that I’ll be talking about issues that are of major importance to their business. That gets me right up the line and into the next phase of my marketing. There’s also PowerPoint files going back and forth all the time because that’s the tool-of-trade in business presentation and so here we are at Kookaburra on dial-up, unplugging and plugging in…

A subsequent community gathering at the Kookaburra Hollow Country Club revealed to the Briggs that many of the other residents were similarly annoyed by the absence of cable. Ensuing discussions of 20 to 30 residents resulted in further pressure on the Developer to clarify and defend its position on the provision of broadband infrastructure to the estate.

It became clear that the Developer wanted to hand responsibility for broadband over to the Body Corporate, and confrontation arose. However, as was recognized by those involved in the dispute, the Body Corporate occupied a conflicted position in respect of decision-making; being at once a residents’ representative body, and while at the same time an organ of the Developer. It is “representative” in so much as all members of the Board are elected residents, with the exceptions of the Body Corporate Manager and co-opted members. It is not an instrument of representative democracy though, and if it were required the residents could be out-voted by the Developer, who holds all the votes allocated to unsold blocks of land, and holds a right of veto on all decisions until the last block of land is sold – an event not planned to occur for some years to come.

Anthony Briggs described this encounter with Pat Weaver, the Developer’s state level manager:

Pat Weaver said to me, ‘It’s a Body Corporate issue’, and I said ‘Bullshit, it’s absolute bullshit. You’re not going to do that. You promised me there would be cable in the estate—that’s between me and [the Developer]. By telling me it’s a Body Corporate issue you’re trying to palm it off.’

Meanwhile, Bill Flanders, who had been appointed as Body Corporate Manager, was also seeking to define broadband as a ‘residents’ issue,’ to be tackled within the framework of the Body Corporate and paid for by Body Corporate fees raised from residents. After a heated Body Corporate meeting in November 2003 in which Bill Flanders proposed to investigate a couple of potential wireless providers through a special sub-committee, some residents decided to reinitiate a public protest by returning to the ‘signs in the windows’ strategy. This time the signs read, ‘We Need Broadband’.

Around this time, residents also began to use the community intranet to expose and discuss their grievances, to seek support and reinforce solidarity, to demand explanations from the Developer, and to suggest further community action. In particular, it appeared that the intranet served to consolidate the community’s cohesion in the face of the Developer, and gave voice to an ever-expanding number of grievances and concerns.

Escalation

Some residents felt that a further escalation was needed with a broader reach to the public. Their resolve to export the dispute to a wider public culminated in an approach to a popular television current-affairs program, which agreed to run a segment on the issue. A posting on the intranet announced the scheduling of the program, and alluded to further action:

After many, many months of frustration at progress around a number of issues, a group of residents has spoken with ABC’s Frontline program… The resulting report will go to air within the Frontline program at 8.00 on Tuesday 16^th November on Channel 2. In addition, we have alerted a number of other journalists to the story, so that our progress in seeking to ensure that Kookaburra Hollow is a truly premium estate will be followed. We are pursuing all options to ensure that [the Developer lives up to all representations made to purchasers within this estate^{. 4}

Although some would have preferred to have the segment focus on the broadband issue, once in the hands of program producers, residents were no longer in control, and the program focused instead on the broader theme of community disempowerment vis-à-vis large property developers, using the build quality issues as their examples. The Frontline segment reported that:

[While] the website describes it as an exclusive master planned community in a beautiful grand environment… some of those who bought into [Kookaburra Hollow] are wishing they hadn’t.

The program documented some residents’ desperation with faulty construction and their intense frustration at negotiating a satisfactory outcome with the Developer and with their Builders. One resident charged evocatively:

Whenever a consumer has a complaint that seems to be contrary to [the Developer’s] cash flow interests, they have an incredible range of methods to stall your concerns. This is the winner of the Urban Development of Australia’s big award for this year and we get treated like children. What is going on in the non-award winning estates?

The Developer’s estate manager defended the estate: ‘When problems arise, we are very pro-active in dealing with the builders and we are very pro-active in doing our best to ensure that any concerns are dealt with.’ ‘Let’s face it’, he added, ‘building a home can be stressful.’

Community Dissension and Re-evaluation

The move to broadcast media from window-signs, the intranet, and local meetings, proved controversial among the residents. Shortly after the television show, the manner and tone of residents’ postings to the intranet shifted. After mulling over the content of her post with her husband, Jill MacPherson queried:

I am very concerned to read [on the intranet] of all the negativity about the estate. I also wonder if there isn’t a better way of resolving issues than going to the media and painting [Kookaburra Hollow] as a dodgy development with bodgy builders.

Anxiety about the course of the dispute was reflected on the intranet where there was a growing chorus of residents expressing their misgivings about how the current affairs program might affect property values at Kookaburra Hollow:

I and most of my neighbours watched the [Frontline] program, and I am sorry to say it unfairly cast a very dark cloud over the area that we chose to live in… Unfortunately, there is absolutely no doubt that the bad publicity caused by that report will have a huge bearing on property values. What if this affects the land sales of the remaining lots at Kookaburra Hollow. Think about it; it’s not good.

In a more vitriolic voice, a curiously anonymous postin^g5 singled out Anthony Briggs:

You’ve gone to the media and managed to make Kookaburra Hollow sound like a dodgy estate everyone should keep well away from. Well done Anthony! You’re helping protect our investment, that’s for sure. The property values here should halve by the time you’re finished, and as owners that’s what we all want!

Subsequently, many residents joined in on the intranet postings to target Anthony Briggs specifically for his ‘over-dramatizing’, ‘over the top propaganda’ and for implicitly drawing all residents into a dispute which, they felt, should have been more clearly defined as the position of only some of the residents. In the face of these attacks, Anthony was warned: ‘Be careful, you run the risk of dividing the community, I understand you feel strongly about certain issues, but I urge you to go about it the right way.’

Another resident wrote:

In a world where things can be over-dramatized I like to keep things simple. And the simple fact is that all my family and I want is to live in a harmonious community. I ask that you don’t destroy that, even before we have had a chance to enjoy it.

Further postings even seemed to indicate that residents were perhaps not, after all, in solidarity over issues of build quality, community amenities, or broadband.

On the subject of [the Developer], when we purchased here, I was also skeptical as to the developers plans, but overall I have to say [the Developer] has delivered and built a most brilliant estate....

Another resident pointed out: ‘At no stage were we under the impression that the developers had anything to do with the contract between ourselves and our builder.’ Another asking whether broadband was an expense that all residents would incur whether they wanted it or not, answered his/her own question unequivocally: ‘We are not prepared to pay for a service that is not a need for our family!’ Most regrets about the broadcast, however, were couched in terms of land values and the potential to impact detrimentally on the residents’ investment.

Interrogating the Intranet

In this climate of community anxiety, disunity and dissension, Bill Flanders of the Body Corporate posted specific recommendations on how the intranet should be used.

The community intranet for Kookaburra Hollow is intended wholly to facilitate healthy communications that promote a sense of identity and purpose for the residents of the estate. It was never intended as a vehicle for people to run campaigns that seek sympathy for any particular cause or which seek to criticize organizations or other members of the community… Some very recent comments have caused us to reassess the current policy of allowing ‘free and unrestricted access’ to the message boards. For this reason we have implemented an approvals procedure for any comment placed on the message boards.

He followed this posting a few days later with the decision to review all posts before allowing them to go up on the intranet.

As Body Corporate Manager, Bill Flanders juggled many competing interests. In the case of the intranet, he was well aware that the Developer still held the majority of house lots on the estate and thus effectively controlled Body Corporate decision-making. He was also well aware that people working for the Developer had access to the intranet, read postings, and were generally unhappy that a facility the Developer had paid to have implemented was being used in ways that were potentially detrimental to the Developer’s commercial interests. However, these concerns needed to be weigh against the interests of the residents of Kookaburra Hollow and their desire for free and unfettered access to the intranet forum. In addition, he had the interests of the body corporate as an entity in itself to protect and he was fearful that as the proprietor of the community intranet, the body corporate could be held liable for anything derogatory presented on the intranet.

Anthony Briggs was ‘shocked’ to discover that after submitting a post he received the following automatic reply: ‘Your post has been submitted to one of the administrators for approval’. Over the coming weeks, many posters focused their attention on the question of how the intranet should be used and/or controlled. Some residents agreed with Bill Flanders:

It may seem like a restriction on free speech, however we as a Body Corporate must ensure that what is stated on the Kookaburra Hollow intranet does not cause legal or moral issues in the community.

A discussion ensued about how best to implement an intranet approval procedure or ‘a moderator’, and recommendations were proposed on whom to appoint to the task. Some residents, however, remained cautious:

There is a WORLD of difference between message board moderation and an approvals procedure. Moderation ensures that threads are conducted appropriately and that any inflammatory remarks are removed, whereas an approvals procedure smacks of ‘Here come the Thought Police’. Last time I checked, I thought I was moving to [Kookaburra Hollow], not some backward communist state.

Others were analytical in their assessment of what kinds of messages would be deleted:

This then raises the issue that we are taking a stance which results in those who comment unfavorably on their experiences of buying or building on the estate should have their messages deleted. For goodness sake, we don’t live in a Nanny State, and it worries me that we will only encourage discussion on matters which some in the community deem to be ‘healthy communications’. If this line is to be pursued, then the issue of what constitutes an unacceptable post is critical.

Another poster acknowledged wryly: ‘I am sure the Developer, council and builders’ view of ‘acceptable’ will differ from that of the residents!’ After several months, review of postings was stopped and residents became free to post on the intranet as they wished.

Getting Connected

The “We want Broadband” signs in windows campaign by residents, did eventually lead to a positive outcome for the estate. Pat Weaver and Bill Flanders were able to convince Paul Mullins, the regional manager for Telstra, that the protests were a public image problem for Telstra as well as for the Developer. Paul returned to Telstra with photographs and worked steadily over the following year to negotiate the internal workings of the Telstra bureaucracy to get Kookaburra Hollow moved up the priority list for ADSL enablement. However, the result of Paul’s work within Telstra would not be seen for over a year by Kookaburra Hollow residents.

As these efforts were underway, Bill Flanders was also pursuing a number of other small telecommunications service providers to provide the infrastructure necessary for broadband access on behalf of the Body Corporate. Cabling the estate was estimated at $2.2 million; a figure neither the Developer, nor the Body Corporate was prepared to pay. Wireless infrastructure looked promising, and a few companies surveyed the estate in order to prepare quotes. However, due to the numerous trees on the estate and the lie of the land, building a wireless service that was reliable looked to be too difficult and none were prepared to go forward with a proposal to provide wireless broadband services.

However, having a ‘sponsor’ at Telstra proved to be crucial in finally getting the infrastructure in place for ADSL services to be provide to the estate. As it turned out, much of the infrastructure was already in place. It also turned out that the significant interest in broadband connection amongst residents had not been registered due to problems with internal (to Telstra) communications processes. Using his position within the organization, Paul Mullins was able to sort out these difficulties and Kookaburra Hollow was moved to near the top of the priority list for ADSL connection. In a two-stage process, the existing infrastructure on the estate was enabled for operation, and then new equipment was installed. Towards the end of 2005, all the residents of Kookaburra Hollow were able to access ADSL services from their homes.

Analysis

Four media contributed to the unfolding dispute between residents and their Developer, and among the residents themselves. The tables that follow analyze the use and effect of these media in terms of purpose and power of actors and actants within socio-technical assemblages (Latour 2005). We have found it useful to distinguish and compare what we have called the domain, register and flow of media and media use.

In the typology below, domain denotes the spatiality and range of media and hinges centrally on who is and who is not empowered to send and receive communications, and how these are channeled within and across more or less private and more or less public spheres. Register designates the expressive modalities and broad spectrum of possible voices, from affect to effect, from the casual to the calculating. Flow refers to a message’s point of initiation and pattern of circulation between communicators and within communications. These dimensions are interdependent, and their interdependence is more or less well understood by actors (though not in the terms we use here).

Table 1: domain, register and flow across four media

The Signs Mediate

The ‘signs in the window’ strategy appealed to resident actors by bringing to the public domain what had hitherto been a private matter between individual residents and their Builders. Shifting the dispute from the private domain to the public domain clearly disadvantaged the Builder, for whom public knowledge of the existence of any dispute constitutes a potential commercial harm, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the matter in dispute.

But whilst the signs were public, the communicative flow was also quite narrowly targeted at a particular public: potential customers that walked and drove through Kookaburra Hollow. From the Developer’s and Builders’ points of view, prospective buyers are at least as important and influential as those who have already bought. The sign-mediated flow of uni-directional and asynchronous communication from anonymous (by name) yet situated (by place) residents to a finite but equally indeterminable public (drivers-by) effectively by-passed the Builders and the Developer.

The shift from the private to the public domain through home-made and displayed signs also constituted a less obvious shift from a contractual or legalistic register, a relative comfort-zone for Builders, to an interpersonal register that was much more convivial for residents. Homemade signs are associated with personal appeals: to look out for a lost kitten or to attend a child’s school fete. They are not associated with appeals to contract law. Moreover, the signs of unhappy faces, exemplified the emotive register in which communication was mediated. Personalizing and emotionalizing the register in which the dispute was conducted ‘wrong-footed’ the Builders by shifting the grounds upon which the fight occurred, away from the concrete objectivity of a contract and a building, towards the subjectivity of disappointed families. First, by acquiescing to residents’ demands and second, by threatening legal action, the Builders eliminated this media and the real economic dangers that negative message in this particular register posed.

Television Mediates

If signs brought the dispute into the public domain, the screening of the current affairs segment did so in a way that was not limited to passers-by but open for the viewing of the ‘whole world’. In other words, the domain was relatively unbounded, free for anyone who intended to watch the program or happened to be watching it. The target audience was ‘the public’ and also ‘the mass market’ comprising both television viewers in particular and anyone who may have a direct or indirect interest in housing development and/or purchase. The program had a capacity to affect the Builders and the Developer at Kookaburra Hollow, but also these Builders and this Developer at other sites. Indeed, because of the very nature of the relatively unbounded domain of television, the segment had implications for developers, builders and residents everywhere. And because of the register, which is set up around the public interest rather than vested interest, and presents as directed, purposeful, factual and informed, it had the capacity to influence. But like the signs, the register of the segment was also emotive and affective insomuch as it strategically deployed the subjective voices and images of disaffected residents. The register was thus dual-channel, positioned between the emotive and moral indignation of residents and the equally moral yet objective reporting and narrativisation that spoke to more universal truths and sentiments of consumer disempowerment.

Unlike the signs, which were put up and taken down by residents, the television segment was ‘put up’ by the residents but could not be ‘taken down’ or undone. The flow, although synchronous, was unidirectional and definitive. Television took the specific experiences of residents and transformed them into a broadcasted story, but it also took away their experiences and placed them in a domain that was outside the residents’ control. It was not simply the content of the segment that disrupted community solidarity. Rather, it was the combination of the domain, the register and the flow that inhered in television and television broadcast that contributed to the generation of certain meanings for residents that, in turn, undermined solidarity. And the media of choice through which this breakdown in solidarity was articulated was the intranet, chosen because of its own particular domain, register and flow.

The Intranet Mediates

The Intranet did not fulfill the same function as face-to-face communication, telephone communication, private emailing and so on. Rather, the intranet had particular strategic functions and characteristics both in its own right and in relation to other forms of mediated and direct communications.

First, Anthony Briggs and the others participating in the dispute regarded the intranet as a ‘really efficient way of keeping in touch so we don’t have to meet every week’. In this sense, the intranet was a key tool through which residents operationalized action against the Developer, and against each other. The well-known and often reported characteristics of on-line communication were appreciated. It is cheap (once the infrastructure is in place), it is asynchronous, it offers the opportunity to craft and edit a message, and it supports permanent archiving. While it could be used one to one, or one to many, the domain of the intranet was bounded by ‘the community’; that is, it was exclusive to those who were authorized to use it, and it was supposed to represent their exclusive interests.

Recognition of the transcendental nature of community interests and of the community intranet was evident in the postings. Individuals were explicitly held accountable to the community through the intranet, through public appeal to the community’s shared financial interests in property values, and through public appeals to individuals to act in solidarity as well as in their personal interests. Residents posted and acted on the a priori understanding that a community existed at Kookaburra Hollow – a premise that is not obviously the case given that the estate had so little history, and that many neighbors were unknown to one another. Further, this community was recognized to exist in a moral space situated between the state and the market (Schofield 2002), in which individual or private interests were not so much erased, but found a complementary and potent expression through joint action. Those exerting direct and indirect pressure on the Developer understood this approach to be an appeal to self-interest through solidarity as opposed to an appeal for subservience to another’s interests.

The residents were also well aware of the peculiar position of the community intranet vis-à-vis the residents and the Developer. Said one poster, ‘I always knew that [the intranet] was not entirely independent.’ Another likened it to ‘a big brother surveillance, and Bill Flanders is its minder’. For them, this seemed an abuse of the intranet’s underlying purpose which, for one resident, was as ‘a residents’ chat group, not for a builder or a Developer to be peeking in’. But the knowledge that the Developer was reading the postings (and possibly contributing in anonymous form) was also exploited. The assumption that postings on the community intranet were monitored, led the residents to use the intranet as a kind of back channel to communicate with the Developer.

The community intranet was a medium established to foster community interaction and community solidarity in ways not related to the dispute. It offered residents a Home Page for upcoming events and daily reminders; a Community Newsletter to which residents were encouraged to submit; Personal, Community and Group Calendars; Message Boards divided into topics such as ‘Council Concerns and Issues’, ‘Gardening’, and ‘General Chat’; a Survey Function that allowed a member to respond to or create online surveys; a Groups Function that allowed residents to establish groups and replicate features of the whole intranet package on a smaller scale; a Trader’s Village that listed local traders and services; A Classified section; and Local Links that provided information and online access to local community resources such as Churches, schools, sporting clubs and the like. In some measure, the range of facilities offered over the intranet probably did foster interaction and solidarity, and as those familiar with Netville are aware, not less so when the facility, provided by the Developer, is used against the Developer (Hampton 2003). But significantly, this community service spirit that was encoded in the conception of the intranet – of what it was supposed to be about – meant that a particular moral economy underlined intranet use. As such, the community intranet was necessarily a communications space that carried an implicit appeal to ‘truth’. The central importance of ‘truth’, moreover, was bolstered by the tacit presence common to the discursive, extemporizing written form. That is, like all other text, a posting is not a social-participatory act, and lacks the inter-subjectivity and shared experience of orality. Text stands independent of its author, and has a life of its own through time and across space. For text in particular, adherence to truth is considered a moral imperative. Barthes makes the point this way:

Wherever there is a concurrence of spoken and written words, to write means in a certain manner: I think better, more firmly; I think less for you, I think more for the ‘truth’ (quoted in Lotfalian 1996).

Truth, as it was mediated through the intranet, owed a fundamental allegiance to the register of fact over feeling. Whilst the ‘fact’ of a detrimental impact on land values was the issue that critics of the strategy seized upon, we suspect from the ‘emotional tone’ of the postings (embedded in the moral injunctions, the lexicon, the use of CAPITALS and in the punctuation!!!) that the television broadcast was seen by some residents as a personal humiliation. In this instance, their choice to buy a block of land and build a new house was not just a matter of financial significance; arguably, their choice also circulated around questions of social identity, of who they were, or what they had achieved and what they valued. A public critique of their chosen home could well have been perceived and indeed painfully ‘felt’ as a public critique of oneself, of the humiliation at being ‘sucked in’ to what was now plainly and publicly a ‘dodgy development’. As Jacob MacPherson revealed when interviewed:

It was the whingers’⁶way out [to contact broadcast journalists]. But it made me angry. I don’t want one person to be making generalized claims about a developer that reflect on me, reflect on my experience... I just thought these guys were stupid… What do you want to do? Give the estate a bad name? Devalue your house? Or resolve it yourself? If I couldn’t get it resolved, I wouldn’t be going and telling the world about it.

But the domain, register and flow of text in general, and intranet postings in particular, make these emotive and subjective responses to public criticism inappropriate. Instead critique is translated into dispassionate arguments about money and return on investment. The intranet calls upon people to transcend personal or vested interest, to speak for community interest, and to express objective interests, not passions, desires and emotions. Individual interests remain a subtext, only visited by way of community interest. Instrumental concerns about property values and the reputation of the estate were laden with affective subtext, such as; ‘I don’t want to be made to look a failure in the eyes of the world for having bought into this estate.’

An intranet posting thus occupies a less personal register than face-to face-interactions, and postings that were not consistent with the transcendent, reasoned register of the intranet angered Jill and Jacob MacPherson. For them, the use of the intranet to make public an individual dispute, a personal dispute, was to occupy ‘a coward’s castle’ and was ‘taking a cheap shot’. Jacob MacPherson judged them harshly:

It is unfortunate that people who couldn’t deal with their own problems would resort to this mechanism. I would never have done it. If I got a problem with the builder I would sort it out myself, one way or another. I still wouldn’t go and tell everybody that I had a bodgy house. Maybe with the intranet people shoot from the hip before they draw the gun.

Jacob and Jill MacPherson could provide many examples of legitimate intranet use—announcing a lost cat, alerting other residents to local thieves, discussing issues concerning the maintenance of the local lake, and promoting debate about whether the estate should fall within the limits of one or another council. Jill in particular was a regular reader and poster. But for them, problems with builders were a private matter, and had no rightful place on the intranet, or on television. The domain was inappropriate. Indeed, Jacob MacPherson likened raising issues of build-quality on the intranet to slandering one’s spouse on the intranet: both were private concerns not suitable for the community or public domain.

Meetings Mediate

As one would expect where a community intranet overlays a residential community, the intranet was not a closed semiotic space, and face-to-face interaction interweaved with electronic communication. Our informants regarded organized meetings of residents such as Body Corporate meetings and the casual meetings that occurred in people’s homes as important. Unlike the other forms of communication, this face-to-face interaction operated within a local and spatially closed and private domain. The register was personal, interpersonal and interactive, and the flow was synchronous, reflexive and participatory, all of which makes face-to-face communication different from the other media.

Anthony was concerned that his postings did not lead to the perception that he was a ‘crazy performer just seeking attention’. Given that they were all part of the same residential community, and not just interacting on-line or for a single purpose, it was very important to the Briggs what sort of general perception others held of them. Anthony used the intranet to expressly assert his reasonableness and rationality, but this in itself is not sufficient. Compared with text, the domain, flow and register of face-to-face interactions were regarded by our informants as providing more reliable indicators of one’s position on the spectrum between “reasonable” and “crazy”. Katie sums it up, ‘They saw Anthony as an out-of-control performer, but that perception could be changed by face-to-face interaction’.

The domain, flow and register of face-to-face interaction is also regarded by our informants as being important in the process of moving towards consensus and decision making. Anthony wrote:

I don’t know what the feeling will be on Saturday morning at the meeting at the Country Club. I hope that a regular session is generated so that all owner-residents can express their views openly. I believe this to be in the community’s interest. If such a forum had existed since day one, then either these issues would not have festered, or alternatively, the community would have formed the view about whether to go to the media, as one. This is the sort of thing that happens when there is no consultation. If people don’t want this sort of thing to happen again, I strongly recommend a regular community forum.

Informal meetings of neighbors were crucial. For Anthony: ‘that is where you have real leverage, there’s two way communication, it’s effective, and you can be persuasive’. In retrospect, Anthony considered that his ‘preferred way of doing it would have been to go round and knock on a lot more doors and do it face-to-face as well as encourage a discussion on the intranet’. For Anthony, notwithstanding the effects and effectiveness of signs, intranet and television, the experience had only confirmed that there was no substitute for personal interaction.

In making decisions like this the actors knowingly managed the domain, register and flow of media, and did so with a view to influencing, controlling, negotiating or contesting how people and events were perceived, who should be granted access to or have knowledge of people, events and circumstances, and how and whether people, events and circumstances should be represented. Between the media, the circumstances, and all the actors involved, a veritable labyrinth of possibilities presented themselves and were pursued or closed off in the course of the community action. By way of concluding the analysis, we present some of the openings and foreclosures.

Conclusion

In our analysis, the key factors that shape these socio-technologies as mediators are that they act in different domains, act in different registers, and support different flows. The participants in this dispute used media with awareness of domain, register and flow, and with greater or lesser awareness of interpersonal, emotive, affective, moral, political and legalistic implications. Given both this general awareness of media and the possibilities and constraints that are perceived and executed in relation to them, actors speak, write and act with effect and affect.

Effect and affect, as mobilized by actors and mediated by media, are distributed unevenly in accordance with the domain, register and flow associated with the media. In describing the media strategies employed to prosecute the dispute, and the responses to those strategies, we argue that they do not faithfully and transparently reproduce the intentions of the residents through straightforward communicative action, without at the same time modifying that action and transforming its effect. The consequences of communicative action are therefore both intended and unintended.

Purpose and power were issues of contention in all forms of mediating socio-technologies discussed here, but they became particularly salient, controversial and contested in relation to television and the intranet. In the opinion of some residents, the domain, register and flow of television made it a particularly inappropriate media, and even those who instigated and participated accept that there were unintended consequences. On the other hand, the move to this vastly larger domain did capture the attention of the developer.

As the use of the intranet was a vehicle for the prosecution of the dispute as well as a subject of dispute, the Kookaburra Hollow case reveals some curious ironies. The intranet’s flow is interpersonal. Postings are not anonymous, postings are often directed at specifically named others, and relationships often extend beyond the intranet to all sorts of other interpersonal interactions that neighbors might engage in. Even where this is not the case, the latent capacity remains significant and residents are mindful of that. But the intranet’s register is transcendent of interpersonal interactions in so much as the space is communal, and is premised on the existence of interests that transcend individual interests, and are held in common. This transcendental purpose would appear to have universal, if tacit, acceptance. The purpose is to provide a public good for the public good. This tension between the interpersonal flow on the one hand, and the community domain and transcendental register on the other, gives rise to the conflict over purpose and the exercise of power recounted here.

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