- By Fred Johannessen, Technology Alliance Program and Market Zone

The real revolution with interactive communities is just starting with technologies such as Second Life.

From wiktionary:

community (plural communities)

1. Group of people sharing a common understanding who reveal themselves by using the same language, manners, tradition and law. (see civilization).
2. Commune or residential/religious collective.
3. The condition of having certain attitudes and interests in common.
4. (Ecology) A group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other.

I can’t help but think that we’re in a transition phase with the whole Web 2.0 concept (it’s really concepts). And of course, we’re always in transition phases regardless of whether your talking about technology, society, or just life. So, what I’m saying is we may be reaching an inflection point in the evolution of social networking. We have many very interesting social networking enablers with blogs, wikis, podcasts, rss, etc. These are effectively evolutionary technologies from their roots in Usenet and ftp which I was using back in the ‘80s. All these technologies provide a shade of the definition of community but they do so from mostly an information exchange perspective. And now we have consolidators such as Jive that join many of the technologies together in one location to give an even greater sense of community by giving access to much of the information in one locale such as BMCDN.

This is why I think we’re reaching an inflection point:   basically, even with a consolidator, we’re still doing store and forward. We have elements of chat/interactivity, but we’re still operating at a fairly superficial level. Based on the definition above, we share language and we have agreed upon manners, we also have media for sharing common interests. But look at the deeper aspects: 1) People who reveal themselves by using… tradition; residential/religious collective; interdependent…interacting.

We’ve taken a very data centric approach to the online community concept, so we’re pretty efficient with data storage, search and retrieval, but we haven’t quite mastered the interaction method. A community should be a place you spend some significant time: you exchange ideas, you give, you take, you argue, you learn, you grow, you help others. And you have varying relationships: some cursory, some technical, some friendly, some public, some private. And these characteristics change dynamically.

All a twitter… I had been skeptical about twitter until I read a Wired article a couple of months ago titled, “Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense”. The article is about how the aggregate effect of getting “pings” of everyday life from people you are interested in creates a sense of awareness of those people that goes beyond the superficiality of the information they’ve provided. Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. He says, “They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.” In other words, it gives people a sense of community. He goes on to say, “This awareness is crucial when colleagues are spread around the office, the country, or the world. Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees… So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal… but the real appeal of Twitter is…[that] it's practically collectivist — you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.”

Wither now? Look at the evolution of Second Life from an online gaming type of community to a medium for online classes, marketing, and (drum roll) collaboration! Combine the shared consciousness of Twitter with the 3-d type of community that Second Life provides and you start seeing the revolution of the virtual community. Now the interaction method becomes oriented to the actors (us) and we are able to create personae for ourselves that reflect the particular social interaction that we are engaging. Second Life enables you to create avatars for yourself (in fact you can buy them online if you don’t want to create one from scratch). What we still need to work out are the filter mechanisms for the interactions – I should be able to create outbound filters that indicate things like mood, desire to interact, and level of interaction that influence other’s ability to interact with me. It’s kind of like having spheres of influence that are set in two ways: 1) statically to reflect my core type, and 2) based on circumstance and level of relationship. However, once we start engaging in a revolutionary type of media such as SL, then the evolutionary processes will kick in to provide higher and higher levels of service and nuances of relationships. The type of complexity you need to have a real sense of community.

And then we need these identities to follow us whether we are on a laptop, phone, pda, or any other interactive device. Now the interaction method becomes human-centric so rather than exchanging data, we communicate in memes – ideas that evolve and become an artifact of the culture – a new, dynamic, and growing online culture – Web 3.0?

If you want a long term projection of where this can go, read “The Golden Age” trilogy by John C. Wright.

P.S. I referred to Weather Report last blog. Joe Zawinul, the founder along with Wayne Shorter, died last week after battling cancer. RIP.