| 10696 - CommunityWiki: OrganizedCulture | 20/12/2005 - 17:23:45 |
OrganizedCultureOrganized Culture is our name for the idea that society will compartmentalize into groups. # Like Organized Religion?The name is inspired by the phrase, "Organized Religion." # At churches, people: #
Compare with a lost atomic family in suburbia. There is the TV, there is mom, there is dad. You don't talk with the neighbors, you don't participate in social groups. Your coworkers may be the closest thing to a community. # Granted, the charicatures are extreme, they do not reflect reality. Churches aren't always so wonderful, and the family in suburbia usually has some friends they see regularly. But there is a reality behind the charicature, and there is a very real strength behind the organized religious life. # Anecdote: LionKimbro knows that the Mormon church in particular is incredibly strong. You can be anywhere in the world, contact your local Mormon church, and your logistics are going to be all sorted out for you. You're going to have a place, you're going to get a job, you're going to be secured. If there are political troubles, they have networks. If you need to ensure that a message is delivered, they have ways. Missionary service is required of all youths. They are highly organized. # What, then, is "Organized Culture?" # Organized Culture is when the great mass of people, soon to be technologically equipped in a PervasiveComputing environment, start to self-organize. # How it Happens"How would this possibly happen? What's different now, that wasn't true then?" # Here's how it will happen: #
We don't know for sure that it will happen, but we think those reasons are good, and we're staring the trend in the face. (More on this in a moment.) If you are skeptical, consider it a scenario – something that could happen, and is worth considering, in evaluation of the future. # Evidence, SignsWe note some trends that we think point this way: #
On the theory that geeks take a technology first, and then everybody else uses it (think e-mail addresses, blogs, ..,) we predict that the phenomenon of organized culture will extend to a very significant chunk of society, perhaps all of society. # Consider a theoretical limit- What if Futures:BrainInaJar comes true, and we live entirely in VirtualWorlds?? Who will you live with? There would be no "neighbors," except those you choose to make, yourself. Choice of neighbors would be mainly (but probably not entirely!) up to you. We would expect then that people would mainly carry social relations by culture. (We cannot assume that people will choose to "live with" other people, at all, whatever it may mean to "live with" someone or some people in this future.) # Now, back to reality: We are not at this theoretical limit. But it is a limit that we are approaching. We are interacting here on CommunityWiki, after all, even though we are scattered all across the world. This virtual environment does exist, it is impacting the material world, it is an expression of an organizing culture. # What Life May Be LikeIt's hard to imagine what life will be like. # Things that were just rough abstractions before ("Are you a goth?") may grow into more rigid alignment: "Yes, I am a card carrying member." Will you actually carry a "card?" Well, it may just be a self-applied tag, and a trust metric (see RatingSystems) with your group. # We may relocate to places. A radical example of which could be: "I live in the Goth floors of the Centennial Tower in Seattle. Just upstairs the hippie floor, and downstairs the anime floor." # We may see lots of HousingCoop?s, where people choose to live together in the same house, or CoHousing?, where people choose to build houses next to each other, and share some things in common. We may see SnowCrash style "claves," or DiamondAge? style "philes." # We can draw on history, and what exists today. There is the song from the 60's, "If you're Going, to San Fransisco," which is where you meet the gentle people with flowers in their hair. In Seattle, there is Capitol Hill, which is where gay people choose to live, and Fremont & Wallingford, where liberal people choose to live. # Two efforts that owe their existance to the Internet are (the group in Georgia working to establish a truely Christian state,) and the FreeState? project- a communal Libertarian group settling New Hampshire. # FlashMobs? are a short-duration (momentary, really) version. # Material world interaction is presently much richer than online interaction. As Futures:AugmentedReality comes online, group members will be increasingly accessible. DodgeBall? is a relatively clunky service that exists now. In the near future (5 years,) we will see more and more services like this, and with much smoother interface, and with far more people participating. Audio interfaces (headsets, microphones) are cheaper than displays; We may hear whispers declaring personal proximities, features of the environment, voices left hanging in space. When we have visor displays, we may see directional markers pointing us to where other group members are, and what their state and willingness to interact are. # If BayleShanks (in San Diego, CA, USA,) LionKimbro (in Seattle, WA, USA,) and JohnAbbe (in Oakland, CA, USA) are on a lunch break at the same time, and perhaps if MattisManzel (in Germany) is on dinner at the same time, the members may be made casually aware of this fact, and two may strike up a conversation. Others in the world, participating in the culture, but not in it, may OverHear it, and stand by to participate, if interested. # Having brought up time zones: EasternStandardTribe is a Free story about a future of OrganizedCulture that is mainly divided by time zone! # Community Anecdotes & ObservationsBrandonCsSanders reported: "I had coffee with Ward (ed: he means WardCunningham) yesterday and he suggested that we have badges at RecentChangesCamp that show an image of a wikipage. Each participant can then wear badges that show which online communities they participate in. Ward says he knows people by the look of their wiki, so having the badges would be helpful. Sounds a bit like an early open source uniform MarkDilley: "Flying home I went through Pheonix, and looking down at the earth from the plane, I made the connection that we already have OrganizedCulture, I think what we want is transparent self-organized culture. The systems that were implemented to build highways and cities and railyards are intense…" # Major Questions
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Original Location: http://www.communitywiki.org/en/OrganizedCulture |
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