Alreday back in the early 1990's, a smart guy at some point said: "People is the killer app!"* The guy was Pavel Curtis, the founder of LambdaMOO, and he was already then well aware that what people really wanted out of the net, was not fancy technology and access to lots of information, but access to other people. The first multi-user dungeon (MUDs, the precedessors to MMOGs) went online in 1979, and during the 1980's, bulletinboards and places like the infamous community The Well (described in writing by both Howard Rheingold and Katie Hafner) thrived. There were lot of discussions, and conversations, and sharing going on in these places, though technology weren't obviously as developped as these days. In 1997, Hagel and Armstrong's book Net Gain - Expanding Markets through Virtual Communities was all the rage; in it, the authors argued that implementing communities were a good investment, because it would amongst other things create "sticky" and loyal users that would be coming back and who would provide interesting feedback on a company's productsi.. So all the hype about the social and sharing aspects of the net being something suddenly "discovered" is, in my humble opinion, widely overrated and blatantly ignorant of the history and development of both the internet and the www.

What I see now emerging with phenomena like weblogs, and Myspace and Youtube, is a new generation of software tools, which allows for a highly interesting intersection and mixture of personal branding and community-building. A weblog is and will never be a community in which everybody is equal. It is not a space like the "old" communities, where people met in one space that everybody shared and which where owned by noone in particular (unless of course it was a commercial community, but in that case the company would often be the physical host of the community, not necessarily a character in the communication). In the blog on the contrary, there is ONE (or perhaps a handful) of people who dominates the blog with their voices and their opinions, namely all those publishing on the blog. So the weblog might constitute a voice in a conversation, but ON the weblog, the voice of its publisher(s) is a brand, and the brand is the voice. Everytime the blogpublishers publish something, they are creating an image of themselves, at the very same time as they are speaking to others. If there is a community emerging around the blog, it is community that is centered around the publisher of the blog, or around the opinions of that particular publisher. And once a blog starts to communicate with other blogs (creating a "blogcluster" which one could argue is another newspeak name for "community"), its communicating with other brands; and as well as maintaining a conversation, it helps build the brands of the other bloggers involved. When a corporate organisation starts blogging, who are we kidding? - its about branding and public relations, as well as it is about creating more open dialogue. These two aspects are intrinsically intertwined, the point is that it is neither one or the other, but both at the same time.

The same double-natured motivation of existence (branding AND dialogue/community-building) applies to other social software "places" as well; the conversation and the seed of the communities they support, is always located at the site of the individual, the profile. Have you noticed that is called MYspace and YOUtube (the latter with the tagline "Broadcast YOURSELF"). There is no "we-media" implied in these names. There might be "We-Media" happening at the spaces, that are still shared on an equal level, like good old Slashdot, or the Wikipedia, but almost everywhere people are always speaking as a profile, an individual the footsteps of whom you can always almost backtrack until you stand at their OWN place on the www.

I havent read or remember clearly any postmodern or modernity theory lately that I could relate my above "theory" to, but of course the articles and thoughts about this are outthere somewhere. What is starting to scare me, is the lack of historical awareness and the missing ability to think about the current development of the web in relation to what has in fact be happening on the Internet for the last 25-30 years, in much of what I these days see and read online (or read about online life). Im afraid that I will increasingly be bumping into students and young entrepreneurs and journalists, who believe that the existings forms of "sociality" and communication online is the best and the only and the most democratic version of the internet that exist. But it isn't and it wont be, unless we try to remember what happened in the days of the "Web 1.0." And if we want to avoid a Web 3.0, that is at heart, all about ME, I think it is time to think more critically about not how the conversations and the democratic dialogue happens (and can be improved), but where it happens and where they are rooted and why they started in the first place, thereby trying to better understand the intricate relationship between "me-branding" and "we-talking".

* it has in fact been impossible for me to track the correct source of this very popular citation. I thought it was to be found in his famous article "Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities", but it isnt in there...It must have come from somewhere, I vividly remember reading it, hmmh...
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:04