Wow… cool site. Never seen it before. I don't know anything about the operational or discursive happenings of Mr Wong's but I think the metaphor of the crowded, teetering, yet regimented apartment house is apt for a moment when many online communities are sufficiently expanded that their challenges now include diversity, crowd and discourse management. Case in point – think of how Nettime is run and the tenor of that list which is, in my view, pretty atomized and impersonal. Multivocal, formal, only occasionally social and definitely not identified as being in the community mode (see their far-reaching freakout when asked to participate, as a community, in the DC Forum). I also think, that while this hasn't been an issue on Rhizome lately, many online forums have to manage the discussion of political reality or risk implosion (which is what happened to the Syndicate list following the UN campaign in Kosovo) – a real-world corollary to Wong's style and content restrictions. On the other hand, Wong's site does seem like communimage in that it's presented as a participatory, communal initiative but is really a fairly controlled formal, design-driven experiment.
Perhaps people from the number of new forums that have sprung forth in the last few years – nine, the pool, discordia, furtherfield, consume, etc. – might want to comment on their particular community trope. Oh, another cool one is communiculture – http://www.communiculture.org/. – Rachel Greene
On Monday, December 1, 2003, at 12:31 PM, Perry Garvin wrote:
> > Perry Garvin > Continuing on the theme of discussing the > featured web sites this week, I
The question of balancing individual and community needs is a really good one, and I think that's what both of Perry's questions get at. To what extent do people want or need an individual space within a community? And to what extent does the community need to impose rules and guidelines on the members within it?
There's an obvious non-answer to this question, which is that it depends on the needs and goals of the community being discussed, but I think there's a deeper point here about community and collaboration.
First, most people want to have their own identity preserved within a community. Whether looking at MUDs and the way that people build their own personal spaces within a larger, communal space or examining the reasons why there aren't many anonymous email lists (as someone suggested in another thread), it seems a pretty common thread that people want to preserve their own individual identity within the community context. Even if the community presents an anonymous/corporate face to the rest of the world without publicizing their individual identities, it's hard to imagine a truly anonymous (as opposed to pseudonymous, which is what most online communities are) long-term community or collaborative environment developing. What Mr. Wong's Soup'Partments gets at is the need for individuals to carve out their own space within a community, though perhaps it's presented a bit more literally than most communities do it.
Second, as Flick Harrison mentioned in another thread, communities need rules - even if those rules are 'there are no rules'. In fact, I think that the less substantive the relationship, the larger the group and thinner the channel of communication, the more explicit the rules of the community have to be. For example, consider two people who know each other well working together in person. They can easily go back-and-forth over ideas, likely without even making every detail explicit, and can still have a successful collaboration. For Mr. Wong's Soup'Partments, though, the "community" of the project is a bunch of random strangers who can submit with minimal intervention from anyone else - so in order for their contribution to have meaning within the context of the project, there have to be explicit rules and guidelines that are replaced by personal relationships and social norms in smaller or more close-knit communities.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that I would define Mr. Wong's Soup'partments as a community in the first place. Yes, it provides a listing of the people who submitted apartments to the building, but does that make it more of a community than, say, the phone book? It's much more like a call-in show on a radio station, in my mind: the various apartment-submitters aren't actually interacting with each other, but rather a central authority collates and organizes their requests in order to create a larger work of art from their smaller, contributed elements.
I've always thought that to be a community, there had to be meaningful group interaction - and while Mr. Wong's Soup'Partments may be an interesting piece of collaboratively created art, I'd have to say it fails to cross the line into being a true community. The metaphor of an apartment building makes it *seem* like a community because of the real-world analogy - but without any way to support participants in the project interacting with each other (in the virtual elevator?) beyond simply publicizing their URLs and emails, the community is no more than an illusion.
> 2) Where joining the community requires > abiding by restrictions including size of > apartment block, style of design,censorship > of certain texts (mainly advertising), and > others laid down by the site's founder.
Constraints are not anathema to creativity, or to community, for that matter.
Constraints on creative practice establish the frame for any work. Frames delimit the scope for creative production. Genres are another type of constraint that facilitates creativity (even if that is by subverting that genre). Constraints are fundamental to creativity.
Creative practices are also interdependent. The developer of the Mr Wong site establishes fields of indeterminacy within which creativity can take place. Outside of this structure, any of these pieces would not be particularly remarkable. It's the juxtaposition of diverse responses to a brief that makes this such a fascinating site.
Community, too, always exists largely as a creative limit on individual activity. Every individual's sense of identity emerges from their distinctive place within a collectivity, and their relationships to others.
Comments
Wow… cool site. Never seen it before. I don't know anything about the
operational or discursive happenings of Mr Wong's but I think the
metaphor of the crowded, teetering, yet regimented apartment house is
apt for a moment when many online communities are sufficiently expanded
that their challenges now include diversity, crowd and discourse
management. Case in point – think of how Nettime is run and the tenor
of that list which is, in my view, pretty atomized and impersonal.
Multivocal, formal, only occasionally social and definitely not
identified as being in the community mode (see their far-reaching
freakout when asked to participate, as a community, in the DC Forum). I
also think, that while this hasn't been an issue on Rhizome lately,
many online forums have to manage the discussion of political reality
or risk implosion (which is what happened to the Syndicate list
following the UN campaign in Kosovo) – a real-world corollary to
Wong's style and content restrictions. On the other hand, Wong's site
does seem like communimage in that it's presented as a participatory,
communal initiative but is really a fairly controlled formal,
design-driven experiment.
Perhaps people from the number of new forums that have sprung forth in
the last few years – nine, the pool, discordia, furtherfield, consume,
etc. – might want to comment on their particular community trope. Oh,
another cool one is communiculture – http://www.communiculture.org/.
– Rachel Greene
On Monday, December 1, 2003, at 12:31 PM, Perry Garvin wrote:
>
> Perry Garvin
> Continuing on the theme of discussing the
> featured web sites this week, I
The question of balancing individual and community needs is a really good one, and I think that's what both of Perry's questions get at. To what extent do people want or need an individual space within a community? And to what extent does the community need to impose rules and guidelines on the members within it?
There's an obvious non-answer to this question, which is that it depends on the needs and goals of the community being discussed, but I think there's a deeper point here about community and collaboration.
First, most people want to have their own identity preserved within a community. Whether looking at MUDs and the way that people build their own personal spaces within a larger, communal space or examining the reasons why there aren't many anonymous email lists (as someone suggested in another thread), it seems a pretty common thread that people want to preserve their own individual identity within the community context. Even if the community presents an anonymous/corporate face to the rest of the world without publicizing their individual identities, it's hard to imagine a truly anonymous (as opposed to pseudonymous, which is what most online communities are) long-term community or collaborative environment developing. What Mr. Wong's Soup'Partments gets at is the need for individuals to carve out their own space within a community, though perhaps it's presented a bit more literally than most communities do it.
Second, as Flick Harrison mentioned in another thread, communities need rules - even if those rules are 'there are no rules'. In fact, I think that the less substantive the relationship, the larger the group and thinner the channel of communication, the more explicit the rules of the community have to be. For example, consider two people who know each other well working together in person. They can easily go back-and-forth over ideas, likely without even making every detail explicit, and can still have a successful collaboration. For Mr. Wong's Soup'Partments, though, the "community" of the project is a bunch of random strangers who can submit with minimal intervention from anyone else - so in order for their contribution to have meaning within the context of the project, there have to be explicit rules and guidelines that are replaced by personal relationships and social norms in smaller or more close-knit communities.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that I would define Mr. Wong's Soup'partments as a community in the first place. Yes, it provides a listing of the people who submitted apartments to the building, but does that make it more of a community than, say, the phone book? It's much more like a call-in show on a radio station, in my mind: the various apartment-submitters aren't actually interacting with each other, but rather a central authority collates and organizes their requests in order to create a larger work of art from their smaller, contributed elements.
I've always thought that to be a community, there had to be meaningful group interaction - and while Mr. Wong's Soup'Partments may be an interesting piece of collaboratively created art, I'd have to say it fails to cross the line into being a true community. The metaphor of an apartment building makes it *seem* like a community because of the real-world analogy - but without any way to support participants in the project interacting with each other (in the virtual elevator?) beyond simply publicizing their URLs and emails, the community is no more than an illusion.
> 2) Where joining the community requires
> abiding by restrictions including size of
> apartment block, style of design,censorship
> of certain texts (mainly advertising), and
> others laid down by the site's founder.
Constraints are not anathema to creativity,
or to community, for that matter.
Constraints on creative practice establish
the frame for any work. Frames delimit the
scope for creative production. Genres are
another type of constraint that facilitates
creativity (even if that is by subverting
that genre). Constraints are fundamental to
creativity.
Creative practices are also
interdependent. The developer of the Mr Wong
site establishes fields of indeterminacy
within which creativity can take place.
Outside of this structure, any of these
pieces would not be particularly remarkable.
It's the juxtaposition of diverse responses
to a brief that makes this such a fascinating
site.
Community, too, always exists largely as a
creative limit on individual activity. Every
individual's sense of identity emerges from
their distinctive place within a
collectivity, and their relationships to
others.