"It Takes a Wiki to Raise a Village": Adeo Ressi's City of the Future to Rise with the Web as its Foundation

BusinessWeek highlights  entrepreneur Adeo Ressi's City of  the Future project , an ambitious plan to build a community in California based on input received via Ressi's online community and based on social media as a way to both develop its framework and to govern its functions. It's a utopian reach to say the least, but one which points out some of the fundamental opportunities that social media may afford people. When the people who drafted the United States' Constitution gathered they were, in many ways, direct beneficiaries of the increased popularity and availability of printed materials that made democratic institutions such as a free press not only important but widely available. So advances in communications technologies may very well presage advances in human government.

Communications in many ways have shaped modern society as much as physical technologies such as transportation and construction. With traditional communications networks the centralization of information in cities was essential, in part because cities as formed by pre-existing communications technologies had always played that role. Ironically, the Internet was invented in large part to allow society to continue wide-area communications in the event of an atomic weapon destroying one or more major cities. Hence the foundation of Ressi's vision of a city of the future is raised on a technology that presumes that cities are no longer present or necessary.  Web communities on many levels are designed to avoid the need for physical congregation as much as they help to enable it at times via social networking tools such as Meetup.com . 

I will be interested to see how Ressi's experiment turns out. Perhaps it will be a little like utopian movements from the 17th and 18th century, in which people set up various "New Jerusalems" such as the colony of Plymouth "pilgrims" who sought perfection in supposed isolation. What they discovered instead was a high level of involvement with pre-existing inhabitants who helped to shape their lives and their outlooks as much as their own idealistic ways. So whatever society Ressi tries to set up will probably be known as much as how it chooses to deal with pre-existing means of communication and human organization as it is for its own self-contained ways. The Web's ability to draw people together into Content Nations is remarkable in that it is able to allow people to build on top of pre-existing societal relationships as it is in forging new societies. People in centuries-old villages have the opportunity to be empowered as much as people in cities or people in brand-new communities of utopian design. 

From this perspective I believe that Content Nation is rising up everywhere as well as in innumerable somewheres. The transformation of society through Web-based communications and the social media tools that they enable will need examples of local success to inspire other local successes but inherently it's a form of communication that can transform any human community regardless of its local traditions, landscape and resources. It is as if a new dimension has been added at every point in our environment, a new savanna onto which humanity is descending as our ancestors moved out of the trees and into the radically altered African environment of a million years ago.  We can try to force some of this unfolding natural selection through utopian organization, but it's more the interaction of utopian ideals with the world as it exists in a newly transformed state that will shape the future of society empowered by social media.

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