Indymedia.org - during demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle in 1999 CNN broadcasted news, which said that the police didn't use rubber projectiles against the demonstrators. The Independent Media Center (IMC) gave another story. While the CNN reporters interviewed the police spokesman and recorded their official version, IMC had over a hundred cameras in the streets. On its website, the IMC published proofs about rubber shots and provided a video, which documented the use of police guns. CNN was pushed to correct its news and inform about the violent conflict.
Do broadcasters tell us lies and disinformation? Why not read news from reporters who are real people living in the actual places of conflict? Yes, time to talk about different structures of organization, self-organization, decentralization.
Developers of the open source do form a similar global network around the idea expressed by the GPL license, which, apart from the economic aspect, has also some social impact regarding the rules of distribution. Open source is supported by companies, corporations, totalitarian governments or military subjects, which realized that it brings them profit. It is absurdly symptomatic, that the most wide-spread distribution of Linux is the Chinese Red flag. Structure of open source development is more relaxed than classical corporate hierarchical bindings with managed motivation, but in whole, it hardly can be called a community. Post-industrial, post-modern and post-cybernetic community has multi-layered relationships, more social aims - and personal dimension.
Communities are always somehow closed. They have their mantras and sound in-formations that unite them. In communities around graphic style it is a more complex network of ties, however, there is a greater independence, or sometimes abstract. The feature of information communities is the acquisition of new information, discussion, creation of opinion systems, spreading of alternative information, that is pushed out from the mainstream media or disinterpreted, information liberation, creation of information bases and sources with an open licence. Naturally developing community sites often contain a public layer - articles at a level generally accepted by other media. Under the systems of access rights there is a strong discussion core, a system of private messaging, user journals or blogs, tools for expressing identity and relationships between users (karma, friends, icon, nickname, avatar, etc).
The type of communication according to Flusser has generally got a tree type structure, in contrast to the pyramidal schema of centralized media. The discussion ramifies at all levels, everyone can reply, create new threads and forums. Corporate discussion can have the same features, however, the result is different. Discussion acts as an illusion of openess, where those, who posses power, generally don't respect the results, to say the least. They misuse them for their own aims and interpretations, or follow the discussion only to identify the potential opponents. This sometimes soaks even into Wikipedia. Didn't I mention Wikipedia yet, and other open publishing systems?
Within the community, the process and results of a discussion are integral and the arguments approach consensus. The deeper, the more specific is the communication of the community. As Flusser notes, modern national languages are more or less artificially created from many local ones in the era of letterpress from economical reasons - because they enable a higher impression. Thanks to the Internet, where the cost of text publishing is zero, we are digitally returning to the pre-literary period of oral communication with many varied communication codes and slangs of a mythical-ritual origin. Furthermore, they develop rapidly and change, which is another element of the protection of communication except the fact that information are strongly contextual.