Commonplace Wikis

Now all Wikis are commonplace. Once this was a novel idea, an Internet community creating together for a common cause. Now everyone is getting into it. Community making starts to combine the Blog and the Wiki. Now we see huge applications collecting individuals in interconnected communities sometimes just for the purpose of socializing, and other times for specific objectives. Applications like FaceBook , BOOMJ , and MySpace are populated by millions of inhabitants, each a link in a chain and a link to a new chain.

These community formats are all formulated on the model of a structured Wiki. This means that there is a minimal amount of writing. Most of it is choose and click, subscribe, or upload. Content is generated easily and quickly, and a narrative of actions is generated as well as the most recent state of the occupant such as "Mary is sleeping."

This is Everyman or The Truman Show at its ultimate. Now all of us star in our own dramas, and these dramas are remarkably similar. But the new rising value is community fulfillment over individual achievement. Humankind is evolving a new gregarious species where personal identity disappears in the collective consciousness, and popularity is more important than individual character.

Performing Arts Wikis

Wikis have been useful as tools for building educational communities of like-minded people. They could be topically driven, such as a group of actors researching and performing Shakespeare's The Tempest, or a group of chamber musicians investigating and commissioning new music, or dancers engaged in creating or reconstructing dances.

Wikis could provide a platform for collaboration among visual and performing artists, its most attractive feature being that all participants are on an equal footing with regard to publishing and editing. It would be helpful if Wikis could be more flexible with regard to equal treatment of all media. This still seems to be a difficulty with regard to Wikis and distributed computing. It is not always easy to upload all media successfully, so that participants often have to store media files on different servers not always suited to such functions and provide links to these media. Although we have made great strides with regard to multimedia presentations on the Internet, there still are gaps that interfere with creative exchange and development of artistic media.

What's New, Wiki?

Wikis are defining a new process, and people collaborating together in a a multimedia-based context make it possible to work together for many exciting, dynamic, creative outcomes. Web art could be a collection of interactive works that function separately and together. It is important that we engage each other and collaborate on constellations of new configurations.

We have barely scrached the surface. We need to break the mindset of Wikipedia. That collaboration has been great, but now on to other communities. The possibilities are endless!

Welcome to Whacki Wiki

You know we are just geting started, but we expect to learn a lot.