the emerging moment of nested things.
As I mentioned in 43things, I would like to be more involved in physical and online communities. I have actually taken action in doing that. I am building a community website for a coffeeshop that has a strong community around it already. As I would like to put it, The physical space will reinforcement the online space, and the online space extends the interaction of the physical space. It’s a really tricky thing about community. The whole web 2.0 / social portal movement has pushed “community” into a buzzword. I am doing the coffeeshop’s website partially pro-bono as a way of giving back to what they have given me. (All the free wireless and all the warm coffees.)
Recently I read a post in a discussion thread by Filippo A. Salustri about Latour’s usage of agency. (I personally do not know much about Latour’s work but I think I will look into it in the future for sure.) The reason I brought this up because Filippo said:
If one accepts this (as I do – not to say I’m right, of course), then could we not say:
to act: to bring about change in a situation
an actor: an entity that acts
an action: the thing done by an actor to bring about change in a situation.
an agent: an entity that can act on itself.
If the same definition were to applied to a community building process, we can analyze the forming of a community and to construct a methodology around it. Is there a formula to build an online community? Why is it that some communities have strong self-sustained power but yet not inviting enough for people? What is the offering of the community that encourages feedback from its members, or shall we say, from its actors?
To look at the “community” topic on a more web development view, it occurs to me that it’s one of those “emerging” moments. I like to describe interaction design as a general study of all designs, at least from what I learned about it from my education. It’s the overall consideration of different fields coming together to become something bigger. The web 2.0 movement, to me, feels like an emerging moment of different development coming together at the same time to make changes. It’s bridging between different fields. It brings media one step closer to audiences. I see the internet going through a stage where everything is clashing together. Recently I saw the concept of a drag & drop web browser OS. The definition of OS is starting to blur into the web instead on local machine. Once again, all the functions/services come together on a browser to help the workflow of individual users. (?) It reminds me of firefox. I believe in firefox not only because of it’s web standardness, but also because of the extentions that allow people to integrate different applications together. People are usually amazed and happy when one application connects to another one. (I personally love ibiz because of its integration of my address book, ical, mail, and even files all together.)
What will be the next emerging? I look forward to a google+microsoft project that is going to take over the internet and media. EPIC 2014 is really coming.
