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there are a couple underlying questions here, i think. one is whether a forum is a public sphere or a private space. if you're part of a community that frequents a board, i think it's pretty easy to see it as a public sphere...if you own a board or think in terms of ownership, it is a private space that appears to be public. at issue there is obviously whether a board can basically change direction at the behest of the owner or not. if you participate in a community and see it as a community, the space which it occupies is de facto collective--the rules of the game amount to a kind of social contract. and i think that is a compelling way to see these spaces--the owner puts the space into motion, but what it is comes from the community. but from that viewpoint, a decision by the owner of the board to change the rules seems autocratic, a violation of the rules of the social game--and it is. at the same time, if you see the board as the platform--and so as something owned by an individual, the prerogatives that follow from that override the rules of the collective game.
in the notice "numerous requests" were invoked to cover over, to some extent, the fact of a direction shift being imposed by the owner.
i dont know what the relation was that you had developed with that community, km, but assuming it was functional for you and for at least some of the members of it, and given that without a community a board is just a board, a website that just floats in the aether, it seems to me that there should be a mutuality, that the owner is constrained by the community, that he or she cannot simply do whatever. but the limitation effectively is the community as a whole--if the direction shift is seen widely as a rule violation, the community can protest and, failing in that, dissolve.
so i dont think the "rights" of ownership allow the owner to be arbitrary. whence the "numerous requests" in addition to an arbitrary-seeming action.
the other one has to do with the willingness of a religious community to talk to itself and not to other folk. that wouldn't interest me, but i know people who are much more into that sort of constrained dialogue within a narrow range of options. so each chooses where they want to play on the basis of the community rules that shape a space that they prefer. it's pretty easy, in principle.
to go back, the reason i think owners are constrained is that i this it more important that there be tolerance for dissent within any community that operates in socially recognizable ways (stays more or less within the rules or contract). there is no question but that the action of this "leed" character amounts to censorship. cyn and others who emphasize the property relation over the social relation switch the game and dissolve censorship under property rights. so shutting down debate, should it be important to the owner, is like deciding to mow your lawn in a different direction than you did before, to make new patterns in the grass, little squares maybe instead of lines.
that seems the conflict here--which frame applies.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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