Networking

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Networked Media Communities
From NmeMediaWiki

Enlarging the scale for human cooperation has created huge changes of behaviour within society and even in societies themselves. The development of increasingly Networked Media may be providing the opportunity for new forms of cooperation between individuals, communities and institutions.

1. A Networked Media community is best defined not by the technology it uses but by the cooperative behaviour it promotes online and offline. Its structures and tools should adapt to enable complex behaviour not the other way round.

2. Networked Media communities, can allow information to be distributed and updated constantly and can represent many perspectives. These include well established organisations but there is greater room for more and more of us to contribute. This challenges critical and engaged consumers to forge the way our history/news/culture is created.

3. Networked Media promotes fluid cross-cultural, cross-specialist exchange, offering valuable tools and relationships to isolated individuals as well as institutions of research, education, business and government.

4. Networked Media will merely reproduce existing inequalities and power structures seen in the wider world unless there is access for all and engagement by all. The laws and licenses created that effect access, such as the ownership and intellectual property of Networked Media content are therefore critically important.

5. Networked Media should employ the necessary multimedia forms and elements to communicate to the widest possible audience. Developments in technology, form etc should increase access and not limit it.

6. The structure of Networked Media means that connections between ideas and sources are more available and more dynamic. For example linking from one URL to another is less linear and hierarchical than in a newspaper. Also less structured and formal news sources (e.g search engine results) can bring about unpredictable news. Bloggers can share comment and build on ideas quickly.