Shirky on Groups

So I was talking with Eben about my first real post on blogs and he referred me to an essay:

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Clay Shirky makes some interesting points about web group communication. I think he is absolutely right that groups produce their own enemies and in exactly the same way he describes using Bion's work. What I'm not sure about is his contention that social and technological rules must be viewed together. It seems to me that in every case before an electronic group arises, the technology is necessarily in place. (That technologiy evolves as a group uses it is incontrovertible, but that is a separate issue, I believe.) Social rules must be established in any kind of group whether on the web, in a classroom, in a household or a bank. These are issues my students and I discuss in Humanities 371--indeed this issue was the dominant one in the A-K section of this semester's class. Using the rules of the class (smile) we had to move on to our discussion of Civillization and its Discontents. I'm inviting the continuation of that disucssion here, if the interest still exists.