Virtual communities

In his 2012 novel “Reamde“, Neal Stephenson describes a community of hackers that is “post-web and post-email.” They operate and communicate within a multiplayer computer game, forming complex networks that have implications in the physical world.

I am fascinated with how human communities evolve from physical to virtual ones, and which elements of the old models persist through this evolution. For photographers, for example, this has had some real implications already – our photographs are rarely viewed in any other media, but on a backlit screen. As Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. wax and wane, they are going to leave some of their elements for the future virtual communities. It would be nice to be able predict what those elements of future visual (and other types) of communication would be…