Thursday, January 29, 2009

In Other Thoughts

BusinessWeek was interested in Anshe Chung because of the enormous volume of virtual equity involved.

I wonder if this thing here, this Caledon, this entirely new form of social media that is Mondserrat, Denver Hax's baby, the rail system, the sub communities under the same flag, the other related and friendly communities of Steelhead and Babbage and Winterfell, the utterly unrelated communties like The Wastelands or Darkmere, I wonder if this is somehow bigger. The fact that these are communities.

1 comment:

Rhianon Jameson said...

"Bigger" has a great many dimensions, of course. But certainly the social dynamic of Caledon and similar communities makes them a very different beast than purely residential areas.

Sad to say, my typist doesn't know many of her neighbors; the workplace has become the "neighborhood," which is not really a good thing. This is similar to the Second Life that many people seem to have - they have a circle of friends with whom they build, play, or whatever, but they are separate from a larger community. Hence the ban lines, which are the barbed-wire fences of virtual space. Assemble enough of those individuals, and you, too, can become wealthy, a la Anshe Chung.

The wonder of Caledon, to me, is that, while (as I understand it), the Guv created his vision with a small circle of friends, and continues to plan (e.g., Oxbridge) or okay (e.g., Mondserrat), it's the unstructured, relatively spontaneous interactions that have created Caledon as it stands today. Letting the original vision develop in a thousand different ways has created a community much more vibrant than any one person could hope to do, and the genius is to resist the temptation to micromanage one's own vision.