Social Media Socialism

Wired has a great article up on the general philosophy at work within the internet community, and especially the Web 2.0 and social media communities. They address a number of good points and the article is definitely worth a read.
One thing stood out to me:

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

So, today’s question is: Is our online community communistic/socialistic?

Identity in Social Media

With one person having accounts all over the internet, all with little bits of information which define who we are to the people there, is identity thus distributed? Identity IRL is about memory and perception, but online memory is archived and perceptions are in bits and pieces. Even lifestreams only show us tiny bits of mostly disconnected ideas.

How about it? Do you feel like your identity is distributed or singular?

This video from anthropologist Mike Wesch sums things up quite nicely and provokes the kinds of questions we are looking at here. What are your thoughts are on Dr. Wesch’s ideas?

Click here to view the embedded video.