Collaborative Reality

Definition

Collaborative reality is a way to describe the act of many people creating a reality over time, piece by piece. It often involves using a shared vocabulary for shared understanding. Examples include Wikipedia, Harry Potter fans, BBS systems, and the entire Internet.

How it works

The vocabulary comes first. A group cannot build anything together until it has agreed on what things are called. Once a term exists, it can be used, argued over, and refined without anyone re-explaining what they mean. Wikipedia has the stub, the edit war, and notability. Harry Potter fandom has canon, fanon, and shipping. Every BBS had its own terms for its own practices; post-BBS most of these died with the board.

Terms get established through use rather than through decree. Nobody approved them. They stuck because enough people used them the same way, and the ones that failed to stick simply stopped appearing.

What follows the vocabulary is accumulation. Each contribution assumes the ones before it and constrains the ones after. A Wikipedia article, a fan wiki, a thread, and a codebase all work this way: the current state is the sum of every prior edit, and no single participant holds the whole thing in their head.

Sociologically this is the same process Berger and Luckmann described in The Social Construction of Reality (1966): externalisation, where people produce something; objectivation, where it comes to seem like a fact independent of them; and internalisation, where new arrivals learn it as how things simply are. What networked systems changed is the speed and the audit trail. A wiki's page history is a record of a reality being constructed, revision by revision, with timestamps.

The examples

Wikipedia. The clearest case, because the construction is visible. Every article has a history tab and a talk page, and the talk page is where the reality gets negotiated before it appears on the article. What ends up in the article is not what is true but what survived argument, which is a different thing and worth knowing about any reference work.

Harry Potter fans. Documented on this wiki at We Are Wizards. Fans built an interpretive apparatus, a musical genre, and a body of writing larger than the source, and when Warner Bros. tried to enforce ownership over the material, the Potter War established that the people building it considered it partly theirs.

BBS systems. The pre-web case, and the one that shows how fragile this is. Each board had its own conventions, its own local jargon, and its own accumulated history in message bases. Almost none of it was preserved. The reality was real while the board ran and did not survive the hardware.

The Internet. The largest instance and the hardest to see, because the constructed parts have become invisible. Protocols, conventions, formats, and the shared assumption that a link means something were all agreed to by people, mostly in documents anyone could read at the time.

Collaborative reality depends on the following ideas: Persistence. A collaborative reality needs somewhere the accumulation is stored, and it lasts exactly as long as that storage does. The BBS case is the warning.

An open edit path. If contributions require permission, the reality is being administered rather than constructed collaboratively.

Enough participants for disagreement. A single contributor produces a document. Disagreement is what forces the vocabulary to be made explicit and defensible.

Where it fails

The same mechanism produces a consensus that has no relationship to anything outside the group. Shared vocabulary makes shared understanding, and shared understanding does not require the understanding to be correct. Conspiracy communities are collaborative realities operating exactly as described, with terminology, accumulated interpretation, and internal consistency.

The distinguishing question is whether the construction is answerable to anything external. Wikipedia's answer is the citation requirement, which routes disputes toward sources outside the group. A community without that connection can build indefinitely and never encounter a correction.

The second failure is capture. Whoever controls the vocabulary controls what can be said, and administrative structures accumulate around long-running collaborative projects. A term that becomes contested is frequently settled by whoever has the standing to settle it rather than by argument.

Related Reading

• Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
• Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge
• Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
• We Are Wizards
• Social Gravity
• Local vs. Global Connectivity
• Designing Social Interfaces
• Ethnomethodology
• Emic Approach
• The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It
• Cosmolocalism
• Computer Lib
• Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity by Margaret MacLean
• The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World
• Critical Play: Radical Game Design

Key texts

• Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Doubleday, 1966.
• Reagle, Joseph. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press, 2010.
• Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Routledge, 1992.