dsilver@u.washington.edu wrote:
But it seems to me that one of the most common (and nefarious depending where you stand on the issue) developments in mainstream cyberculture during, say, 1997 - 2000 has been the commercialization of online communities. Is it just me or does it appear to the rest of you that the folks at Amazon, Yahoo, and fill-in-the-blank.com have been reading Howard Rheingold?
Not the commercialization of online communities, but the constitution of online communities inside commercial space. The Amazon community, or eBay community, etc didn't exist prior to Amazon or eBay and then become commercialized via Amazon's or eBay's behaviour. Rather, Amazon and eBay produced communities as commercial commodities. As commercial commodities, those communities had quantitative value: they were translated directly into dollar figures by equities analysts as a way of valuating the company's worth on the market. Which, in turn, provided incentive for this activity. The assumption that communities and commerce exist in an agonistic relationship is problematic. They don't, necessarily. The drive to build community is as native to commercial activity as it is to non-commercial zones, Howard Rheingold notwithstanding. (Heck, just look to what radio folks call the golden age of radio.) So, rather than fall into that can of worms, maybe it is better to talk about communal ties outside commercial enterprise in a normative way, ie as a Good Thing. What are the implications for the Internet when commercial enterprise expends the most resources on community-building? What are the different ways in which community can cohere (and does cohere) inside commercial spaces, and what are the implications of these different kinds of community-building? etc. cheers Bram --