Join me in a fascinating conversation with Samantha Venia Logan, a seasoned community builder and scholar. We dive into the intricacies of creating healthy online communities, discussing the difference between healthy incivility and toxicity. Learn how to manage and nurture your community to foster genuine connections and resilience. 

Tune in for insights into the social science behind community dynamics and practical tips for sustainable growth.

and each week we talk with a community leader about what makes their community thrive and bring value to both the leaders and the members. Join me as we unpack the magic of the elements of community.

You studied under one of the most impressive community speakers that I've ever met, Martin Carcasson. And I just loved the opportunity to sort of pick apart, and by pick apart, I don't mean find fault in, but I mean understand even more fully and even more deeply. Pick apart the ideas that he introduced to me. So without further ado, would you like to jump in and tell us about you?

So, I did the unconventional thing, and I took them all. While I was taking them, I was so gracious and excited to have incredible professors doing incredible things. Martin was one of them, my time with the center for Deliberative Democracy has really underpins my work in community. It's very much a development and political cultural infrastructure, but those skills translate. They are base level necessary skills for community builders, but they're not really a part of the way that community builders do things.

And all of those incredible and studies from Elizabeth Williams, Kim Nichols, who works in Primatology, Martin Carcasson, absolutely fantastic. And I was also mentored by people in industry, John O. Bacon, being chief among them. And I'm so lucky to have all those experiences, I'm so lucky to be able to translate them as well.

So most recently, what I've been up to has been a move to Melbourne, Australia. Because I started a PhD on this exact topic, like, after 4 years of doing this, I was actually brought back into the academic fold to actually study, how we can inoculate our online communities from toxicity without battening down the hatches?

so things get

Lucas Root: said.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah,

Lucas Root: Keep going.

And based off of their work, which is this concept of recognizing bad actors in incivility concepts, that's not necessarily toxic. We need resistance, we need discussion, and we need to be challenged in our communities. When you get trolls, Ruth Diaz knows so much about this as well.

Lucas Root: I had the coolest conversation with her and we will definitely have a podcast with her, at some point.

And at the same time, when that sense of belonging sours, we can see that toxicity translate from Community A that has soured, but still looks perfectly healthy. When you look at communities in the manosphere, for instance, on Reddit, the great Reddit purge was largely due to that. And those communities in Perspective API, like Google's toxicity engine, and in Detoxify, the open source version, they couldn't detect at all, the toxicity of these spaces. Because ordinarily, they're perfectly healthy. That's how they do it, right?

Lucas Root: Okay, that's huge all by itself. To you and me, I think, that probably seems so baseline, that's the carpet we walk on. Why don't we spend a minute and just talk about the difference between healthy incivility and toxicity?

Samantha Venia Logan: Absolutely, a hundred percent. It's really, really fun, that's the work of Verity Trott, Venessa Paech, and my advisor, Dr. Beckett. So, I'll actually send over the research, I'll send over the absolutely amazing case study that I've been focusing on.

Lucas Root: We'll put it in the show notes.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, a hundred percent.

Lucas Root: My wife teases me that I argue, and when I'm arguing, it's actually a good thing. It means that I'm interested and excited, and the person that I'm arguing with is worthy of the argument.

Samantha Venia Logan: I know, right?

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly, and healthy incivility is how we challenge culture.

Lucas Root: And as you pointed out, it raises the immune system. When we're challenging culture, we're not looking to take it down. We're looking to build it up even more powerfully, even more strong.

Samantha Venia Logan: And there is an aspect of that very healthy system potentially going wrong, right? One of the most common micro examples, comes in organizational health. And this actually happened to me, this example, times before I went to work at Digital Marketer with Ryan Deiss, I try to credit as many people as possible.

So, when I went to Digital Marketer, I ended up speaking with my HR person as we were setting up paperwork. And she's Oh yeah, there's this really big resistance movement in human resources against this very concept. Which is the fact that a vast majority of software companies and marketing companies and corporate architecture, they don't build communities within their organizations.

Lucas Root: Okay. Here's what's happening in my brain right now. I understand all of this, but by listening to it, and by the way, This is a thing that happens in community, so we can come back to this very thing that's happening right now. By listening to it, I'm in a position where I can start to reorder my own experiences inside of a concept that I had not applied to those experiences Thank you. even when I have the concept available. There I was in banking and I experienced exactly what you're talking about, I experienced toxic homogeneity.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. Oh, um,

Lucas Root: And have the language or the concept to apply to it. I do now, as a, community expert, as somebody who gets to have conversations just like this, but I hadn't reapplied it and you're helping me do that. Oh, this is fun.

When you experience challenge, approaching things with empathy, especially when it comes to what you give out, right? You have to go beyond value, because community is all about producing ultimately a sense of belonging, like that's the pot at the end of the rainbow. And I think a lot of people in this modern community context, which has been very businessfied, commodified and tokenized value, value, value, value, value.

Lucas Root: I'm a member of an online community, this is true. Right now, I like the people that are in it, I like, showing up, I like contributing, I like what I get out of it. The founder came to us and said, I'm going to 5X the price next year. But my intention is that I'm going to 50X the value and I said, I'm out. Because the truth is that I'm not there to make money.

You just said it, I need to make money, that's how the world works. If I can't pay my bills, then it doesn't this computer goes away, like my internet goes away, I can't connect to those people anymore, like I have to pay my bills, but I'm not there to make money. I'm there to share ideas and to be inspired by really cool people inside a really exciting container, I'm there to feel like I belong.

The last thing you want to do is cause a diaspora that leaves you behind. So maybe, consider the goals of the community and the things that are unmeasurable that produce you. a sense of community health void of ROI. You need to do those first.

Lucas Root: A sense of community health void of ROI.

Lucas Root: Typically, it's almost entirely internal.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. In a lot of ways, the poisoning of incivility, which is perceived by these communities as an attack on our values, our goals, our experiences, our practices, and the artifacts that we intend to produce. We often view this incivility as an attack, and it might well be, right? But if we don't handle it authentically, and empathetically, to better understand, and distinguish the difference, the souring of our community can come from anywhere.

Lucas Root: Are you familiar with Wolff's Law?

Samantha Venia Logan: I'm not.

Samantha Venia Logan: That escalated real fast, but I can absolutely see the set there. I think in a lot of ways, that really sets the hallmark, your community does need to be challenged. And it grows that way, there's an internal immune system that keeps it healthy. And the problem is, If you continue with this analogy, this concept of infectious disease and vector control.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, exactly. And when you consider malaria in the south, and you consider tuberculosis, these diseases, these issues, they can absolutely be controlled via this concept. People have been inoculated to herd immunity, but herd immunity doesn't work the way that we described it during the pandemic. There are certain vectors where we have to be active about not spreading diseases.

Lucas Root: No, we don't.

do

Samantha Venia Logan: a cell flowers. Dying.

Lucas Root: No,

No, it's not just dying, it's seppuku.

Samantha Venia Logan: yeah, It is intentional death in order to protect other cells, and we don't have that. The growth of homogenous souring communities can go completely unmeasured, and therefore completely unhandled.

Samantha Venia Logan: And the great Reddit purge was us realizing the platform had cancer.

Lucas Root: We we now have a cloud of understanding around healthy incivility, and that there is a difference between healthy incivility and toxicity. How do you tell the difference? How can you see it?

Samantha Venia Logan: Absolutely. Right now, I'll be honest with you, that's the point of the PhD because, if there is a community out there who actually measures bridging capital. Social capital theory is like the core of our job, Bordeaux, Putnam, Peter Block, it's the core. We have to know what this means. So, if you don't know what it means, it would behoove you to learn.

Lucas Root: Stephen, Stephen MR Covey, who was on this, and wrote The Speed of Trust is the same thing, it's bridging capital. He didn't use the word, but yeah.

And then, there's the outlier, there's bridging capital. And this concept is, how do we share information across the various communities we are a part of? Which results in the movement of information, knowledge, people, and architecture, reputation, right? Bridging capital, because we've been so spending so much time focusing on bonding capital, it's DNA of our communities. We're not measuring this last one, right? There's no high resolution concept for it.

Lucas Root: I don't think we're really measuring linking capital either.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah.

Lucas Root: Maybe

Samantha Venia Logan: networks work.

Lucas Root: Could you bring him on here?

But even now, I would say, that they don't have a high enough resolution, because there isn't really a focus on social currency, and bridging capital enough for us to understand the difference between incivility and toxicity. We get it in our relationships, we know when someone is toxic, we know when someone's going to be a problem, and we moderate those actions. This is entirely a moderative, facilitative exercise, but the reason, the state of moderation is where it is, it's because, we don't have that high enough resolution measurement.

Lucas Root: Let's put this into a conversation where people understand it. Some of the people who are listening are academics, and are totally going to understand everything you just said. I think the vast majority of my listeners are actually business owners. And if we don't help them out, they're going to zone out.

When you put a contact into your phone, there's a cost. And the cost is at the very least, the amount of time that it takes for you to sit there with your phone in your hand and go like this, cause let's be honest, people still use their phones. And that cost is high enough that cost itself, just doing this for 13 seconds to get somebody into your phone is so high, and it is high.

Now, the number between a thousand, right? That's the people with whom you have linking capital, not necessarily bonding capital yet, you haven't necessarily gotten there. The cost of doing this for 13 seconds is not high enough for you to have bonded with that person, but you have linking capital. You have exchanged cell phone, you've put in this much. And to us, in our current day and age, in the way that we live, and how important this tool is to us, that actually means something.

Samantha Venia Logan: Absolutely.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yes, absolutely. And then the concept of bridging capital, like, we do this all the time, right? You and I personally have done this, ad nauseum, right? You just said something and it's ringing in my mind from this other community. Oh, you should go join them, or you should go talk to this person. And it allows us to trade or transact between our online communities, information, relationships, and that social capital. So, when you think about Oh, this person needs to meet this person, that's bridging capital, right?

Samantha Venia Logan: I think in a lot of ways, the social capitals have been tokenized really heavily. And as it stands right now, the tokenization of bridging capital feels like it doesn't have equivalent value. Because the commodification is not as useful as bonding capital. That's a problem, we look at lifetime value all the time, this concept of individuals returning to our communities over time, which increases the likelihood that they will buy, right? That's really useful to a fiduciary stakeholder.

Lucas Root: And that's purely bonding capital.

but we call it networking. Right, Building and structuring those relationships beyond the concept of personal connection. Networking at scale, is not really happening in a large majority of communities, and when it does happen, we're not measuring that. And oftentimes it's that bridging capital, the information that connects one person to another, that acts as an attack factor for toxic members. And we view it as a very good thing, right? They're struggling with that thought they're going to go elsewhere. And if that elsewhere happens

Lucas Root: Not even necessarily voice it. They haven't been able to be heard.

And if it happens to be a dissenting opinion, that is harmful to the dominant context, the public sphere, right? If that is harmful, but that opinion has not given time to breathe, when it was small, they're going to find somewhere toxic. And they're still a part of your community, right? They want someone else to agree so that they can feel confident bringing it up later in your space. That's bridging capital, right? We don't have a measurement for it.

Lucas Root: Yeah, that's what they want. It's weird to think about that. What they want is to go somewhere else, not to leave and be gone, but to find support to come back and help you build back stronger.

There's potential harm that you

Lucas Root: to be enjoying that you pointed out.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah,

Lucas Root: for a long time. Like, that is exactly the perfect like, that is the perfect breakdown of herd immunity.

Samantha Venia Logan: exactly. Right.

Lucas Root: Perfect breakdown.

Samantha Venia Logan: Thank you.

But no one actually thinks about the way that each boundary actually works. It's just, as a person comes closer, they're activated to be a better member in your community. But in reality, those boundaries are membranes, like a cell. There's a concept of transparency, how easy is it to see past that membrane and know you want to transgress it? Then, there's another concept that we ignore even more, porosity.

And it doesn't matter how opaque and how difficult it is for you to make that membrane, you batten down the hatches, you strengthen those membranes, that doesn't make you safer, right? You can over moderate a space, and not solve the problem. Insular minority communities who have fought tooth and nail to survive, not necessarily through healthy action.

Lucas Root: And they were successful, and we look at that and for very good reason, in a very real sense, we reward that with positive long term memory, like we've turned them into immortals.

Samantha Venia Logan: And think about the harm, like it's done great things too, but think about the harm it's done to the public sphere. And I should probably explain public sphere as well. Right? So the public sphere is the,

Samantha Venia Logan: yeah,

Pretty much, it's just the status quo. And in a lot of ways, the status quo is, those places of public conversation. When you flash with people you would not otherwise have met, and that's a great thing.

Lucas Root: it's the best.

it wasn't wrong because the theory was inaccurate. It was wrong because it was broken down by the time he published. It was broken down, it doesn't exist, it does not reflect reality. Not because the theory is wrong, but because reality abandoned it, that's important.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. And now we're back to Martin Carcasson, I really wish that his talk wasn't a workshop, I really wish it was published on CMX's YouTube channel. So that, like it was there, but it wasn't recorded. But, Martin has

Lucas Root: amazing I

Samantha Venia Logan: many recordings so much conversation about how to

Lucas Root: far enough back in my linkedin, I took very detailed notes and posted about it. That's how you found me actually.

Lucas Root: When we think of tackle, we think of football or rugby. We think of a person being down and out. And the play now moves on without that person. What we want is something much closer to a white blood cell. We want to surround it and fully incorporate it in our understanding cells.

Mm

Samantha Venia Logan: exactly. Exactly. In my analogy, I actually attribute the three social capitals, bonding capital is like DNA. It allows you to transgress membranes and outward, it needs protein, it needs health. So, people have to transgress those membranes like nutrients. Linking capital is very much the organelles of the cell.

Lucas Root: And part of that means, that I need to take in this thing that I'm bumping into, that's external, You know, that's alien. Not in a bad way, but I have to take it in and I have to understand it and I have to learn about it. And here's what the body does next, the white blood cells tell every other cell in the body what's going on, but it doesn't stop there.

So now, the entire body understands this new thing, and either knows how to deal with it itself at the cellular level or knows how to ask help for it,

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly.

Lucas Root: more. We don't just stop there. We actually start telling other bodies around us about it. We do it through our sweat, we do it through our pheromones that mostly communicate through something that we don't see in our noses.

Samantha Venia Logan: The body has developed really strong measures for potential attack factors in immunology. And when novel viruses come up, again, recognizing the sensitivity, I actually say this in the PhD often. I recognize the sensitivity of proposing an infectious disease and factor control analogy to community to the natural world's trauma that we've experienced.

Right.

Lucas Root: The information is fresh in our minds and we're going to be more able to take it in and engage with it.

So, we can absolutely contribute this and it fits well. I don't want to abandon the analogy cause it's perfect. you know, it's not perfect, but it's, yeah, I've discovered, I have to be a lot more careful with my words since going back to Academia as a consultant, like I'm happy to be bombastic, right? I'm learning to talk like an academic, and I think in a lot of ways that can make things less accessible, so I'm counting on you in that regard. at this point,

Lucas Root: a consultant.

Samantha Venia Logan: I think I do pretty well.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, absolutely. I think, one measurement that we do currently have a standard level fear that we have in our online communities is something called bus factor. And I'm not sure if people have been exposed to this concept. Bus factor is the percent likelihood based upon those social network diagrams been long, right? The percent threat that one individual who has built a reputation in your community might leave, and that the connections they have made will follow.

It's viewed as this threat. Please don't leave, please don't leave. And when we think about that bus factor, we can also think about when people come in. And they show like this percent likelihood of building themselves to that point can develop lead metrics for asking about that.

Lucas Root: At a corporate level, we don't use them. We only use them on the B2C, on the customer side.

Samantha Venia Logan: Exactly.

Lucas Root: For example, I don't know if you've been through this, but I have. I can actually tell you the number of times that I've left a position and I was replaced by more than 5 people.

Lucas Root: So, we know that they're going to leave, but we haven't bothered to figure out why? That is very classic.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. If we think about it, they had to take time to build that, they had to take time to create that influence. And if we understand how that influence is being built and maintained and set up, we can ask whether or not that influence is maybe going to go sour, does this person gaining this much effort? Is that person a healthy individual? And when we think about it in the context of social media, how do Facebook groups, and I've seen this on Facebook, but this is an extremely common strategy used by Russian troll farms during elections.

Same act, this is just the community version, right? So for me, it's very easy to do, and it's a technical infrastructure, and it's basically troll farms. This is the community version. We should probably measure that.

Lucas Root: Very cool.

I love it. Okay. I think

Samantha Venia Logan: Thanks for letting me talk about research. I think it was a good

Lucas Root: I was a willing participant. I wasn't just tolerating it.

Samantha Venia Logan: I'm glad. I think it's interesting at least,

Lucas Root: okay. So I like to, wrap up my interviews with three questions.

Samantha Venia Logan: I'm game.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah I'm actually doing live report outs in a lot of events. All of which you can find on my YouTube channel.

Lucas Root: What is a report out?

So you can stay tuned for that. The easiest thing that you can do is just subscribe to the YouTube channel.

You'll get all of this.

Lucas Root: Nice. Love it. Second question. This is the curveball. What was the one question that you wish I had asked you, but have not?

Samantha Venia Logan: Oh, you know, I wish we had some time to dive into our anthropology nerdom

Lucas Root: oh, I mean, we do and we could turn the camera on again, but yes, you and I have spent truly hours at this now

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah. We very much have a lot of shared interest in human origins and the core aspects of community building, and I think in a lot of ways, those core aspects of how we came to build communities as humans. They have left a lot of integral flaws and that's okay,

Lucas Root: nice. Thank you. Third one, and I'm going to partially answer this one for you, but the third one is What would you like to add as a closing note? And the piece I'm going to throw in there is that you have a book coming out soon.

And so People should follow you and keep track of when that happens.

Samantha Venia Logan: absolutely.

Lucas Root: But now you get to say your part.

Samantha Venia Logan: Yeah, 100 percent. So for those in the Northern Hemisphere I'm hoping to get the manuscript in by the Christmas holiday. My

expectation is that it'll probably be summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Of next year that you'll be able to have a hard copy in your hands for those who love the smell of pages, like I do.

Um, am one. I

Samantha Venia Logan: A social scientist for sure. And there's this great book by Kristen Luker about social dancing salsa dancing. I apologize. Salsa dancing into the social sciences. It's very much a performative artistic act where we apply knowledge and practice to the art of creating an emotional connection, a sense of belonging.

Lucas Root: Thank you, Venia.

Samantha Venia Logan: hundred percent. I am so excited. I'm so happy. I'm so jazzed by this discussion. So thank you so much for having me on.

Lucas Root: Yeah, me too.

Narrator: Thanks for joining us this week on Elements of Community.

Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode.