Virtual Communities as Collaborators

The jury is still out on these virtual communities such as MySpace, FaceBook, BOOMJ, and Twitter. Recently, digital educational guru Stephen Downes was criticized for following only 30+ fellow Tweeters out of 1000+. Ed Techie Martin Wheeler seems happy that he follows as many Tweeters as follow him (130+). Laura Dewis of Open Air notes the difficulty of trying to follow too many:

I’m at a a stage of my Twitter life where I am wondering how many people I can follow. It’s not quite a mid-life crisis but at 30 something (following) it’s already a struggle to keep up with all the good leads.

In all my social networks, I’ve always employed rules and kept my networks quite focussed. The rules will be different for each site depending on what I want to get out of them - social or work connections for example. But in Twitter, everyone following me looks interesting so how can I resist clicking that follow button?

Twitter is for genuine conversation, and while the concept is extremely attractive, I am not sure how much more I can take on. I want to take on the world, be the world, and yet the physical limitations still prohibit me. My imagination exceeds my reach.

Many of us are dinosaurs, having been around since the beginnings of the Internet and WWW, and we recognize that the gigantic comet erupting over the horizon is the emergence of the end of an era. There is a new species emerging from the digital debris, a communisaurus, in which commitment to group collaboration and fulfillment is the strategic objective, and virtual communities are creating new meanings and values.

Such developments go beyond back and forth conversations. The new virtual communities will create new ideas and works through active, dynamic collaboration. Through such creation their collaborations will make new collective meanings leading to new manifestations of art and arts making.