Accept no substitutes

Category: Virtual Communities (Page 20 of 20)

Links and notes from JOMC 191.8 Virtual Communities

Mentioned in class today

John Perry Barlow: His blog, his Homestead at EFF, his recent Reason interview, his famous Declaration of Cyberspace Independence (1996), some Barlow lyrics (mostly recorded by Grateful Dead).

The Well today at Salon.

Howard Rheingold’s HotWired (today’s not anything like the HR version), then Electric Minds, thenBrainstorm Community.

Robert Putnam, Ray Oldenberg, Ronald Burt, Marc Granovetter, Walt Disney and others are listed our readings section.

Annotating Rheingold’s Virtual Communities

I’ve always thought it interesting that back-to-the-earth hippies ran Howard’s beloved Well, so I usually include links to the Farm Community, the Farm (is there a difference?), some of its history, and a bit about the founder, Stephen Gaskin.

Then again we have the engineers and bureaucrats who were critical to the growth of the Internet in particularJ. C. R. Licklider and others.

The National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine has one of the best history of the net sites — beginning of course with the telegraph.

I have to point out that despite a 10 year opportunity to correct errors, Howard didn’t creditCommunity
(Gemeinschaft) and Society (Gesellschaft) to Tonnies (he says Durkheim for some reason)
.

Tempora Heroica has been supporting MUDding for over 10 years and still is going strong. There is a history there to be written for sure.

Before we get all excited about William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, let’s remember Vernor
Vinge’s True Names
is really The first cyberpunk/cyberspace story. It
has obvious and predictive links to MUDs, IRC and virtual worlds.

Muller and Dauber

Today, we had two UNC faculty members, who have become public intellectuals via blogging or at least noticed beyond their specialities and this school, visit our class. The idea here is to see how knowledge capital and social capital can be expressed in the blogosphere by very different folks doing different kinds of work (intellectual work but yes work too). We were also hoping for and got interesting personal stories and opinions. Opinions for bloggers! I’m shocked! One thing to notice immediately is how passionately both feel about their writing and their engagement with the blogosphere.

Cori Dauber’s blog, Ranting Profs, is aimed at ‘media coverage in the war on terror’

Eric Muller’s blog, Is That Legal?, started out as random musings of a law professor — not necessarily about legal matters — but recently has been taken over by his research area — Japanese Interment in WWII — after a more than just lively run in with author Michelle Maklin.

Both have drawn on their readers for more information (knowledge capital) and support and references and other outlets for their work (social capital).

Enterpreneurs, economists, networks

At noon today I went to a talk by historian Peter Coclanis about the history of entrepreneurship as part of a program on Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative . Odd to be there since I have been a kind of ward of the state for the past 25 years, but the topic turned to social networks and social capital. The trend in entrepreneural discussion seems to be about the importance of networks drawing on an argument between Granovetter and Ronald Burt. Burt would be useful for our class especially with his work on “Structural Holes” which sound a lot like some of what we heard in Doc’s talk. Burt and Nan Lin have collaborated in the past (nota bene seminar members).
Peter also made the case for commuities of creators (not his word) who were more “loyal to the craft than to the companies” and how this made an area endure and grow — citing silicon valley and RTP as examples.
One point made over and over was that creative enterpreneurs don’t really do anything new but they recombine and/or reuse existing ideas — Ford taking interchangable parts from Whitney via Colt and adding the assembly line taken from the slaughter houses.
I, who hold that all art is recombination — and so copyright should be weak to allow more art to be created –, have to pause when the entire of the myth of orginality goes out the window.

Later in the afternoon, I ran into Koleman Strumpf and his co-author F. Oberholzer who wrote “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis”, the paper that showed that P2P music trading has no economic effect.

Book recommended by Coclanis: How Breakthroughs Happen The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate by Andrew Hargadon

Doc’s talk

We had a very nice crowd for Doc’s talk today despite the rain which is approaching monsoon level as the remains of Francis approach the area. We should have video on the web and Doc should be posting his slides in the next day or so.
The talk was more marketing than blogging, an update on ClueTrain with some nods to Howard Dean (very much in passing) and to Linux and Linux culture (more than passing. this included a narrative by Doc’s youngest son told with plastic penguins — I hope he has these slides online soon).

Doc’s visit to my class

The nice thing about guest to a class like ours is that the guest can range around quite a bit and we’re small enough to absorb and even revel in that ranging. I sent Doc down memory lane by bringing up the fact that when he lived here in the early 70s that he was part of an intentional community, Oxbow. Doc is still interested in community and not completely accidential ones that build around physical proximity. So off we go.

Unlike the talk for this afternoon, Doc was allowed to tell his story with digressions and questions along the way. We were helped out by questions from some of the folks who work with me at ibiblio.org as well as Cori Dauber and Richard Vernon. (Richard was once Doc’s editor at Linux Journal).

I am still not sure if blogging and bloggers even when aggregated by Technorati constitute something called a “community.” I am becoming more convinced than before that blogging can become a part of ‘everyday life’ (thanks Barry Wellman) and can facilitate the creation, growth, and maintenance of communities. Perhaps blogs are one of the better examples of the ‘strength of weak ties.’

John Hood suggested links

http://www.johnlocke.org/lockerroom/ of which John says:

As you can see, it ranges widely; politics, history, economics,
pop culture, whatever. It is written by staff, affiliated fellows and
scholars, and a number of other folks we have “invited in”
and armed with appropriate passwords. It does not accept comments at this
time, as I’ll be happy to discuss.

Our “Raising the Issue” feature is a regularly scheduled debate between JLF
and the NC Justice Center on issues of mutual interest. It happens in
real time within our blog (another is scheduled for Thursday, that is
tomorrow — yikes) and will soon happen on theirs, too, when they
get one up.

Here’s the link:

http://www.johnlocke.org/raisingtheissue/

And here’s the announcement about it:

http://www.johnlocke.org/press_releases/2004052464.html

Notes from our second class

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