Imeem: Another hybrid monster

There is a thin line between the idea of a community and that of a network. As such, Imeem (www.imeem.com) is another hybrid creation that boasts to socially connect people amongst themselves through an array of media-sharing features. This includes the possibility of sharing videos, photos, music as well as playlists, blogs and groups. The latter categories of playlists, blogs and groups demonstrate that Imeem members have the ability to share their tastes and thus their common values. Hence, amidst this array of networks that enable individuals to share their media content, there is also the option to go beyond the superficial stage of a network and look deep into Imeem’s well of sociodigitization in order to find communities that subsist due to their shared meaning. Therefore, just as Facebook is a network in which communities can be formed, so is imeem. In essence, it is another creature, a hybrid beast resulting from the union of a community and network. It is a website where collaborative filtering is omnipresent and where technology reveals the physical shapes of the networks that connect people. However, just as technology shapes social dynamics, it merely organizes the content that is present on the imeem website. Although one can say that the content-organization process found on imeem may lead to sharing more than just media, it is hard to imagine what goal is shared by the website’s members that makes Imeem a community rather than a network. In his book entitled “Internet Galaxy”, Manuel Castells discusses the idea of community networks by using the example of the Mexican Zapatistas who promoted solidarity via a virtual network on behalf of exploited Indian minorities. So where is Imeem’s communitarian side? What do these members share concretely aside from a few megabytes of mp3’s or jpeg files? Some see Imeem as an “open source” network, where the act of sharing media content is perceived as a new social endeavor and can thus constitute the shared meaning of its members, therefore making the website a form of community. The answer to whether Imeem is a network or a community is not that simple because it demands of one that he define something that is in the making. Technology shapes our social structures, thus with the speed at which technology is changing social structures, perhaps to state that a new form of sociability is being created might not be so far-fetched. With the idea of mass sociability, which focuses around the idea that a certain incentive drives a loosely connected mob or crowd, one finds that the terms network and community are getting increasingly closer to each other in the context of virtual social interaction. For now, Imeem is only in its Beta version, and does nothing more than allow its users to share data under a system of “folksonomy”, where each individual can tag his or her favorite pics, videos or mp3’s. It is a network, but with features that are sometimes strikingly close to that of a community.