The open secret of the Internet is community: open because
among its users it's well known; secret because as obvious as
it is, many folks don't "get it."
Community -- in whatever form -- is about engagment. Engagement
in its active forms means beloninging, the glue that binds together
folks who might otherwise have little in common. They form to
preserve something for themselves - against the boundariless
body politic. Communities exist as differences in needs - one
identifies with a community in the context of these needs and
mantains relationship in community as long as these needs are
perceived as important.
Interface, equally, is about engagement. The invisible interface
-- an ideal -- engages us totally, at every point, in a subterranean
narrative which feels absolutely natural. And interfaces exist
to fufill a need.
So community and interface share an isomorphism -- the need
to engage. Their meeting point, the Internet, brings both together
into autopoeic unity. It's impossible -- and self-defeating --
to separate them.