Digital Communities

Forming communities is what humans do. We join communities to find one another, to belong. We join communities to express ourselves, whether religiously politically or any other way. The drive to form communities is as old as civilization, in fact it is why we have civilizations in the first place.
But communities today work very differently. Everything is all sped up - over night is not fast enough anymore. In the past, we've always seen the big eats the small, in the new knowledge-based economy the fast eats the slow. Speed is the new BIG! But speed isn't the only change. Digital technology has amplified the ability for a single individual to reach out to its swarm. In social networking communities, the voice of one quickly becomes the voice of hundred and one or 1 million and one. There are no geographic borders, no boundaries and no limits. These communities are on facebook and myspace. They're in your e-mail address book, they're the 1200 volunteers who edit wikipedia, they're the assortment of people who created linux, they're the 9 million who play second life.. They're the free form digital communities that arise, interact and disperse and they are the blogs that are alive and responsive as a school of fish.
Technology has made it possible for human communities to behave like swarms of their own. We are more in touch and more in tune to our peers than ever before. Lets capitalize on our networks and push these communities to move towards positive change through engagement and co-creativity.

(Reference: Chuck Brymer's The Nature of Marketing)