[Air-l] Re: Company vs. Community

[D. Silver]

Wow, lots of goodies in my inbox today.

I want to second Fred's plug for Tiziana Terranova's article "Free Labor."
I've used it in a class before and highly recommend it.  Plus, thanks to
Dorine (hi Dorine!) for mentioning *brand communities*, an interesting
concept I hope to pursue further.

As always, Jonathan makes a ton of good points, many with which I agree.
I don't have a satisfactory answer for why the term community has assumed
star status within Internet research except to suggest perhaps that's what
happens in the early stages of canon formation: a particular idea or
notion or concept is introduced early on and an entire generation of
scholars bite on to it in order to find some kind of grounding for their
own work.  To riff off of Jonathan's post, it would be interesting if
Rheingold had titled his book Virtual Kindness or Virtual Good Will

There's a number of folks on this list who have been researching and
writing on virtual communities for some time now.  I'd be interested to
hear whether the rise (and fall) of dot.com culture has tweaked their
outlooks and directions, either past or present.

david silver
http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver/