Opening remarks:
First of all, the ideas of community and collaboration are ones that I have felt have been uniquely suited to the Net, and are a large reason why I have been with the electronic art community as long as I have (I got on the net in 1985 in Engineering school, 9 years before the Web). Much has happened since then; one could say that it has been a bit of a social revolution.
There are three threads that come to mind when considering the description of this week's forum. The first is the language of the forum's topics and description, Secondly, I will address some of the issues given in the description, and lately, I want to ponder some of the issues relating to the shape of online communities and collaborations in terms of collaborations and signal jamming. Keep in mind that all I am about to say are speculative in nature and are offered for the sake of discussion. I will also release these remarks in the form of three questions, to be released one at a time.
The first item is the matter of the word
Semi-Darwinism…A Chat-Eat-Chat world, eh?
The first place that comes to mind when I think of the private sector taking ahold of the community's cultural psyche over a gradual period of time is what has been taking place in Toronto since the founding of MuchMusic on Queen Street West.
People seem to live their lives through the Corporate filters of "Fashion", "Style", "Glamour", "Money" and "Fame". I understand that the Avatar environment known as www.there.com sounds like it might be Toronto's online equivalent.
To answer Patrick Lichty's question, one would have to be more specific to the particular Avatar community going through this transitional phase that spins between the semi-quantum states of Corporate and Collective cultural discourse.
In general, we can see the private sector working hard not only to secure the Avatar world but the Audio world as well with regards to patent copyright and virtual piracy and the like.
I can say that this negative trend towards dealing with Avatar Communities has led to some negative results. Offhand, I recall that Active Worlds (www.activeworlds.com) when it formed around 1996 had a bustling Artistic community and a healthy population even though it was still framed as a subscription dependent community. People did not even seem to mind the advertising providing that some people were still allowed to sign on for free as "Tourists" and that subscription fees were reasonable. This all changed for a few months in around 2002 where they decided to hike subscription fees and eliminate the Tourist feature. I swear the population halved and protests were happening within Active Worlds to restore the subscription fees to pre-2002 levels. Also, the Avatar citizens started to see the development of "Tourist Rights" and similar reasonable facsimiles.
So, just like the offline world, the Corporations are trying harder to tighten their cultural reign over the community but all that seems to do is enflame the direct need for CyberSubversion (TM) and AvaActivism (TM). I am curious to see what will happen in both the offline and online world in this regard. In more ways than one, we are approaching David Gelernter's "Mirror World" concept that will also be subject to Corporate resistance.