6.1.2 This new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global. It favours intangible things - ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks. (Kelly, 1998, pg. 2)

6.1.3 In the previous two chapters, we have seen that our networked identity is defined by the data we carry, whether in physical or digital space. In this chapter I argue that online community building is very much connected to the development of electronic commerce and our relationship to time. Commerce implies the exchange of "goods"; I use this word in a broad sense to include knowledge exchange so as not to necessarily limit the meaning to monetary value. Commerce is also deeply connected to our perception and structure of time, which is still very much based on the principles of the industrial age.

6.1.4 The intent of examining this subject is related to thinking about and ultimately proposing alternative ways of understanding commerce by developing a prototype of a marketplace for artists working on the networks. These artists are already a community in the making, international in scope and growing in numbers and influence. Artists experimenting with digital media are largely living and working in context of academia, industry, and research centres such as Xerox Parc and Interval. The developing communication infrastructures of academia, however, is the ideal environment for the inherent interdisciplinary nature of this work to thrive.

6.1.5 Research universities are a much better environment for development of this new field than specialised art schools, no matter how prestigious, precisely because of our need to be in dialogue with many different points of view at all times. But there is one problem in making this community truly cohesive, and that is the lack of time. Although communication networks offer the possibility of a distributed community that can collaborate and exchange vital information, there is little time for these collaborations and exchanges to occur. Ironically the same technology which makes distributed community a possibility and promised to save us time prevents us from actually having time to build community. But once one accepts the state of distributed presence, inevitably this means acceptance of a group consciousness, which shifts our perception of time and even productivity. Time can only be gained when we return to the collective mind and a truly collaborative space.

6.1.6 The clock that rules our lives and the machines that have sped up the clock have brought us to a precipice. Computers are largely developed to automate tasks, not augment and extend the intellect, as originally envisioned by people like Ted Nelson and Englebart. It is increasingly difficult to secure sponsorship for long term projects focused on planting seeds for the future rather than on short-term results (product). We are slaves to the short-term clock, focused on the product, not the process. Short-term visions drive contemporary societies, and it is rare to encounter those who are investing in the future that is beyond their own lifetimes. For generations, people measured the future by decreasing the distance from the year 2000. Now that we are at this juncture, it is time to conceive projects that stretch out visions long past five-year plans and thirty-year mortgages.

6.1.7 H.G. Wells, who imagined the ultimate existential vehicle in The Time Machine (1895), thought at first that that our mastery of time and space would equip us to solve the problems of lowly material nature. During the 1930's, he entrusted global power to a cadre of omniscient pilots who called themselves 'Wings Over the World.' Those winged evangelists, however, soon took to bombarding the earth with missiles. In Gravity's Rainbow (1971), Thomas Pynchon described the symbiosis between a GI and the V-2 bomb raids on London by the Luftwaffe. A rocket launch, for Pynchon's hero, repeats the first destructive moment of biblical creation, that combustible big bang when God sent out a pulse of energy into the void. Scientific and technological advances have been driven by the military industry and these visions ring a cautionary note in light of the war in the Balkans taking place at the time of this thesis being authored.

6.1.8 Fuller, whose career was closely linked to the military throughout his lifetime in one way or another, made conscious moves to shift technological advancement from 'killingry' to 'livingry.' He left us with many artifacts, models and writings to use at this juncture of our reconsidering space and time in relation to computer technologies. One of the most practical models in this respect is Fuller's World Game, conceived as an antithesis of the War Games. [top]