On-Together: Virtual Co-Working

Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex With Users—Even Children

Chatbots on Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp are empowered to engage in ‘romantic role-play’ that can turn explicit. Some people inside the company are concerned.

The inequities of our remote gathering tools

As we’ve been transitioning our in-person communities to virtual ones, our modes of interaction are now firmly established in tiny…

we were online

Turn the internet into a living, shared space with real-time traces of people browsing.

meet.coop - The Online Meeting Cooperative

Online meeting and conferencing tools, powered by renewable energy running on cooperatively owned and managed infrastructure.

Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration

"This thesis presents an application-oriented theoretical framework for generalised and specific collaborative contexts with a special focus on Internet-based mass collaboration. The proposed framework is informed by the author's many years of collaborative arts practice and the design, building and moderation of a number of online collaborative environments across a wide range of contexts and applications. The thesis provides transdisciplinary architecture for describing the underlying mechanisms that have enabled the emergence of mass collaboration and other activities associated with 'Web 2.0' by incorporating a collaboratively developed definition and general framework for collaboration and collective activity, as well as theories of swarm intelligence, stigmergy, and distributed cognition. "Accompanying this creative arts thesis is a DVD-Rom which includes offline versions of the three Internet based collaborative environments designed, built and implemented in accordance with the frameworks for digital stigmergy and mass collaboration developed in the written work. The creative works in conjunction with the written thesis help to explore and more rigorously define the collaborative process in general, while testing the theory that stigmergy is an inherent component of collaborative processes which incorporate collective material production. "Supported by a range of contemporary examples of Internet activity, including the accompanying creative works, it is found that stigmergy is a deeply rooted mechanism inherent in not only traditional material collaborative processes, but a range of emerging online practices which may be broadly categorised as digital stigmergic cooperation and collaboration. This latter class enables the extreme scaling seen in mass collaborative projects such as Wikipedia.org, open source software projects and the massive, multiplayer environment, Second Life. This scaling is achieved through a range of attributes which are examined, such as the provision of a localised site of individualistic engagement which reduces demands placed upon participants by the social negotiation of contributions while increasing capacity for direct and immediate creative participation via digital workspaces. Also examined are a range of cultural, economic and sociopolitical impacts which emerge as a direct result of mass collaboration's highly distributed, non-market based, peer-production processes, all of which are shown to have important implications for the further transformation of our contemporary information and media landscape."

Resonite

A novel digital universe with infinite possibilities. Whether you resonate with people around the world in a casual conversation, playing games and socializing. Or you riff off each other when creating anything from art to programming complex games, you'll find your place here.

Meet

Real-time meetings by Google. Using your browser, share your video, desktop, and presentations with teammates and customers.

Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams

I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…

Screen As Room: An Architectural Perspective on User Interfaces — Christoph Locher · Interaction Designer

With the use of video games as social spaces being observed for several years and the increased focus put on virtual social spaces due to the scarceness of physical social spaces in the last months, the concept of “spatial interfaces” is once again at the center of discussions. I want to add an alternative perspective to this, looking at the properties of physical spaces as metaphors, rather than models, for interfaces and exploring seven of them in more detail.

Screen As Room: An Architectural Perspective on User Interfaces — Christoph Locher · Interaction Designer

With the use of video games as social spaces being observed for several years and the increased focus put on virtual social spaces due to the scarceness of physical social spaces in the last months, the concept of “spatial interfaces” is once again at the center of discussions. I want to add an alternative perspective to this, looking at the properties of physical spaces as metaphors, rather than models, for interfaces and exploring seven of them in more detail.

Ambient Co-presence

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier

Howard Rheingold tours the 'virtual community' of online networking.Howard Rheingold has been called the First Citizen of the Internet. In this book he tou

Human Nature Applied Virtually

In November, I'll be leading an online writing workshop called Friends as Force Multiplier [https://otherinter.net/workshops/fafm/], hosted by semi-enigmatic consultancy Other Internet [https://otherinter.net/]. FaFM will focus on understanding, navigating, and leveraging internet communities — from empathy to economics and back. I don't have any teaching credentials

The Digital Life Collective

The Digital Life Collective is an enabler. If you think we should be doing something we're not currently doing, we're here to help you and your project make the change you want to see in the world.