| and jonThis is a tricky one. I stioemmes get a (teeny little) bit dispirited that when activity bubbles up someone feels the need to organise it. Sometimes that can be a good thing but often that activity came about because there wasn't a structure in place, be it organisational or social. While I may have ostensibly been in charge of the Flickrmeets and set the ground rules, once it was proven to be working I stepped back and announced those rules could be torn up if necessary. The makeup of the group dictates the way the group works. On the flipside, there was a move to take the regulars from the Flickrmeet and form something closer to a trad photographic society with a name (Birmingham Exposure) and website and exhibitions and everything. It didn't work for various reasons, and I wouldn't want to state what they were, but I suspect the desire for that came out of seeing a new way of doing things and applying the old way of thinking to it. (To flip again, I don't think has the same issues it's a different beast altogether).I think what's interesting about online social spaces now, and which slightly differentiates them not only from offline but from traditional online communities, is that they don't really exist as communities. Twitter does not have a community. Your Twitter community overlaps with mine but they're different. And Twitter as a whole cannot be reasonably be seen as a community. While Twitter is a solid example of this the same applies to online social activity generally. The blogs we follow, the Flickr groups we're in, the searches we monitor they're all unique to ourselves. The communities are merely where they overlap a lot. And because our online activity is constantly shifting (not being mediated by geography or monopoly media) those overlaps are also shifting so these conceptual communities grow and shrink. And when they shrink we think that's a problem when in fact it's perfectly normal and should be celebrated.As for social capital in this area, I think it's tricky to generalise about it because, again, it's personal to each individual. You don't have good standing in a community. What you have is good standing with a number of active people whose online activity overlaps which enables you to do something with those people (putting it crudely). If hierarchies exist then they are, by the nature of the environment, going to shift and change. Someone who one day can marshall hundreds may not be able to the next day because those hundreds might have their attention elsewhere. Hickman: those with the social capital are going to be very busy because the rest of us will hang around waiting for you to do something. And this is why I get dispirited. The people with the social capital generally didn't do much to get it. That's not to diminish what they did but, in my case, there's nothing I did to build my rep that anyone else couldn't have done. I just had the attitude (probably from my zine days) that I wanted to see something interesting happen, the existing hierarchies weren't gonna do that for me, so I had to do it for myself. wWith the benefit of hindsight this is what the Flickrmeets and Created in Birmingham were all about. Stop moaning that they should do this and that and don't think you're not good enough to do it. Fuck em. Do It Yourself. And, if I'm now one of them , tell me to fuck off. Get your posse together, be it three people or a hundred, and get on with it.
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