Monday  2002-07-15   Web of Services

Interactions breed more interactions

Doc Searl's JabberConf presentation, "Anarchy and Infrastructure" notes that

Hollywood sees the Net as a plumbing system for intellectual property and other "content".

Wired magazine's recent article "The Bandwidth Capital of the World" covers online gaming mania in Korea and points out

In Asia, where copyright law is only loosely enforced, massively multiplayer online games are less risky for media developers than movies, music, TV programs, or console games. Unlike freestanding content, online worlds are almost impossible to pirate. Someone could copy the client application, but the game itself lives on a centrally maintained network. Even if that person were able to duplicate the backend system (it costs millions to run Lineage [a very popular online game] as a reliable service), there is no way to replicate the presence of 2 million people and the dynamics that occur in a human system of that scale. The value isn't bound up in the content. It's bound up in the interactions — in the group experience.

South Korea's broadband commons challenges North American assumptions about what bandwidth is for and why it's relevant. In the US, cable, telephone, and media companies spin visions of set-top boxes and online jukeboxes, trying to "leverage content" and turn old archives into new media streams. There is a profound fear of empowering consumers to share media in a self-organizing way on a mass scale. Yet this is precisely what makes South Korea the broadband capital of the world. It's not a futuristic fantasy that caters to alienated couch potatoes; it's a present-day reality that meets the needs of a culture of joiners — a place where physical and virtual are not mutually exclusive categories.