When Smart Mobs Collaborate...

We're on to the next panel. Trebor Scholz from SUNY makes a start, talking about Free Cooperation which was inspired by the book Gleicher als Andere by Christoph Speer - dealing with the question of setting up collaborative projects which involve a more equitable and non-hierarchical structuration of power. He has a nice excerpt from Speer's article "Trust No One! Some Remarks on the Political Economy of Virtual and Global Networking".

In this vein, the Free Cooperation meeting which Trebor and Geert Lovink organised was set up to avoid the pitfalls of conferences - no keynote speeches, sessions with highly limited participant numbers to encourage conversation, etc. (We tried something similar - doing away with paper presentations altogether - at the fibreculture 2003 meeting which Geert, Molly Hankwitz, and I organised. There is a DVD of the FC meeting coming out, too - makes me wonder if we should do something similar with the video tapes from the fc meeting which are still sitting on my desk at work waiting to be dealt with.

Nina Czegledy is the other presenter, speaking on network dynamics. A nice quote: 'it seems that network is the new god'. She also notes that networks have been around forever, but that we're only now noticing their true importance (also for [new media] art). Also, social network forms have evolved from traditional top-down company network structures to others which enable far more useful and interesting interconnections. And in fact of course it is interesting to see the wide range of applications which network theory has found - from the biological to the social to the financial, military, computational, etc. etc.