ASDF

I hope everyone still remembers Joe who visited us during class, and he sent me a long email with his thoughts:

on ethans internet:

the idea of the internet as a protocol is not too far from the truth,but the hardware infrastructure has to be built and maintained by commercial agencies until we can at some point automate or labor-distribute the resources necessary for maintenance… and possibly some day, growth (lofty dream there, but being researched)

and the internet as we know it will only remain free if the pathways created by the interacting hardware and abstracted to protocols by said hardware remains a “neutral” tool/resource. once the pathways created by the protocol are no longer equally weighted, there will be additional, unsupportable load on the cheaper pathways.

aside: from a techie/engineering background i rarely imagine the business side of things, and it may show in my comments.

regarding the beginning of class discussion:
i was fairly impressed at the lack of a definition of community and the lack of attempt at a true definition when attempting to classify things as community. this is the engineering side of me talking: how can some thing be classified without a clear definition of the category into which it would fall?

i think that yan was the closest in answering the question of the definition of community to my own definition based on the discussion of the class (non-independent). “a resource (website?) to which users in question (aka the community) return to on a regular or semi-regular basis with the explicit goal of interacting within the structure of the resource”. of course, this means that the dating websites would be considered community. do i agree or disagree? my initial reaction is to say it is not a community.

i think that further definition is necessary if you want to objectively classify this restricted case of a community. if the intention of the members of “the community” is to interact with those they have already encountered, then the dating site may not be a community in the strictest sense unless the designers of the site facilitate and observe that emergent behavior in their system.  if a community is defined as a place where users return to have interactions with strangers, the dating site would definitely fall into the community category. personally, i prefer the former definition and would not call a dating site a community unless it does facilitate contact between returning users as “friends” or some other socially binding construct within the site’s interface.

in my mind, there has to be the expectation of continued communication with other people holding that same expectation in order to create a community. without that expectation, all that is available is simply a resource or tool.

regarding netflix:
the main question i heard from clint was not “is netflix an online community” because it seems to me that via the sharing and messaging and rating functions, the structure for an online community is already built. the question i heard was “is netflix on an appliance or otherwise non-interactive medium a community?”. my answer to that question, although i did not want to take time away from those who are actually in the program, is that it does not create a community via the medium itself (seeing as the medium does not facilitate any communication) but it does create META communities. these communities are built upon existing social communities. for example, some people where i work do have xbox360’s and they use these appliances to watch netflix movies. they now talk about the movies that they watch, even though the xbox itself only minimally supports community-like interactions. were these people not co-workers (i.e. within an existing community), they would not be involved together in a community as i define it because they would never have met to interact about the movies which they watch on netflix. that is why i call the community created by the appliance a META community: it lives on top of (and may modify) an existing social structure rather than creating the structure.

-joe